viz. - Visual Rhetoric

“Rueful Reluctance:” An Unwitting Cat Owner’s Search for Meaning Among Memes

james.wiedner — Wed, 03 Sep 2014 03:12:19 +0000

Image Credit: "Nyan Cat-Pop Tart Cat," by Chris Torres

Last week, my neighbor stopped by to tell me that he was moving, and that pets were not allowed at his new residence. With all due histrionics, he lamented the fact that he was going to take her to the shelter, and that “unless anybody here wants to adopt her, [insert overly dramatic sigh] I guess she’ll probably be put down.”

My manipulative neighbor was playing me like a fiddle. He knew I had a soft spot for that cat; hell, I was the one to feed her on multiple occasions when her deadbeat dad couldn't be bothered to do so. The cat liked me, too. Whenever she’d enter my apartment, she’d survey her surroundings and then proceed to scratch the side of my couch like it was her job. I’d tell her to knock it off, and she would, but not without looking at me with what I swear was a bit of amusement.

When I realized that Violet had already moved my (generally) rational thinking into the land of the Pathetic Fallacy, I tried to take solace in the knowledge that I wasn’t the only one. And while I can’t fathom ever creating cat memes myself, it would be foolish to underestimate the power that felines have had over the human photographer since there were photos to take. Aside from the comedic or cuteness factors, publishing cat memes has always been a lucrative endeavor.

Around 1900, author Osgood Grover sold millions of books, one of which was 1911’s “Kittens and Cats: A Book of Tales (hyperlink below)” The image below is just one example of the many pictures of costumed cats. Many of these pictures are even replete with “quotes” of the internal monologue of the pictured cat, just as we see in the typical meme of the digital age.

Image Credit: Dan Bloom http://dailymail.co.uk

Over 100 years later, cat books are still where the money is at. In his New York Times Op-Talk interview last month (“Confessions of A Cat Guy”), author and illustrator Peter Catapano described what is known in the publishing industry as “going cat book.” Catapano says that brilliant authors that tire of having brilliant books overlooked can get rich from publishing an identical book, except with pictures of cats throughout it, “because people will buy literally anything with a cat on it.”

So, it would appear as the cat meme was here decades before us, and there’s no reason to think that they won’t be as popular as ever after we all shuffle off this mortal coil, perhaps it’s time to do away with what Catapano calls the “rueful resignation” that accompanies “becom[ing] the sort of person you had always ridiculed- in this case, a Cat Guy?” it seems high time that even those who don’t count themselves among the “Cat People” finally accept- and even learn from- what these cats and their people are trying to tell us.

The Austin Zen Center's Garden as a Model for Austin

Jay Voss — Wed, 02 Apr 2014 06:47:34 +0000

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

Nothing sums up the best of Austin’s landscape gardening tastes like the garden at the Austin Zen Center. Located on West 31^st Street between Guadalupe and Lamar, the Austin Zen Center’s garden is impressive any time of year. Every plant in the garden is native. The vegetation in the garden never, ever receives sprinkler water. The entire growing space is focused around a gorgeous old live oak tree, like a dry landscape garden is focused around a sizable boulder. It’s only when you look at the Austin Zen Center’s garden twice that you notice the massive live oak isn’t centered on the acreage – that it seems to do so is only an illusion. Everything in the garden is clean, pure, and honest, and a steadfast commitment to these virtues on the part of those who care for the landscape has the effect of producing a space that is harmonious and seemingly balanced.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

The Austin Zen Center was founded in 1995 when a local psychologist named Flint Sparks lighted upon the idea of starting a weekly zazen practice for the community in his psychotherapy office. Austinites soon started showing up for their weekly dose of zen in serious numbers, and Sparks and his friend Bill Magness had to look for a new location, so in 1998 the group started using a small room in the back of the Clear Springs Yoga Studio. According to the Austin Zen Center’s website, within three months the budding meditation society was overflowing into the Clear Springs Yoga Studio’s other spaces. The group decided to form a board and systematic leadership, and the everyone raised money to rent a new place. In February of 2000, the newly formed Austin Zen Center moved into the house on West 31^st street. An extremely generous donor eventually outright purchased the home for keeps, and the Austin Zen Center has resided there to this day. From what I understand, the gardens on the plot are maintained by Austin Zen Center meditationers.

(Image Credit: Jay Voss)

There’s an odd way in which the past fifteen-odd years of growth at the Austin Zen Center is reminiscent Austin proper’s ongoing population boom. As that Zen Center grew out of the Clear Springs Yoga Studio, its members were bustling about and exceeding their allocated space. Similarly, the turnover stats for rental spaces and homes in the Austin area are impressive. The more I think about it, it’s hard to be cynical about these things. They just happen, and they probably always have happened. I’m sure some Parisians objected when Sacré-Coeur was built, you know? Anyways, what I find idyllic about the Austin Zen Center’s landscape garden is that it’s one shinning example of an Austin community managing insane levels of change. They do so in their gardens with peace and harmony. They strive to radiate balance and honestly. Maybe I’m wrong about all this, but that’s how I feel when walking by the gardens on my way to and from work. Take a look at the pictures in this post and see for yourself.

Casino's Law: Defending American Liberties in Personal Injury Attorney Advertisements

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 07 Feb 2014 22:37:01 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

The Super Bowl, with an audience of 111.5 million people, tends to be a place where the definition of “American” is equally invoked and contested. Not only do the hard hits and pick-sixes play out America’s strength, but also the commercials display American ingenuity and self-expression. After all, what could be more American than Bob Dylan in a Chrysler commercial, a cowboy driving a Chevy Silverado, a multilingual performance of “America the Beautiful” over a bottle of coke? At this year’s Super Bowl, only a personal injury attorney ad could top these greats.

The epic spectacle of Jamie Casino’s advertisement for his Savannah-based Casino Law Group not only invokes an All-American superhero origin myths but also adheres remarkably well to the personal injury attorney ad genre. Considering all the ad’s buzz, what makes this one so great? What makes attorney ads so arresting?

For one, it uses visual and verbal rhetorics of the action flick to portray Jamie Casino as a superhero fighting the villains:

H/T: Deadspin

There’s so much about this commercial that belongs to the Hollywood revenge flick: the “based on a true story” disclosure, the horrific tragedy of his brother’s death, the injustice of the crooked police, and the graveside scenes. The throbbing metal beat comes in at the turning point: “At some point, a man must ask why God created him.” The transition from clean-shaven lawyer to bearded badass who wields the sledgehammer labeled for his brother “Michael” against a shadowy, fiery background, slamming apart the gravestone, plays out in the lyrics as well as the visuals: “When you fall down on your knees / Beg for mercy: ‘mister, please—’ / The time has come to make things right / There ain’t no judge for pleadin’ to / We done convicted you / The Devil gets your soul tonight.” This ad perfectly fits its Super Bowl time slot: it’s as over-the-top as Joe Namath’s fur coat, as high drama as the safety the Seahawks scored in the game’s first play, and focuses on an all-American warrior who “speak[s] for innocent victims who cannot speak for themselves.”

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

I wasn’t surprised to learn from interviews with Casino himself and the commercial’s editor that they intentionally used a cinematic narrative style to draw the audience in. As Stephen Withers, the commercial’s editor put it:

He had a pretty solid idea of what he wanted. He used his storyboards to set up the edits the way he wanted. It was really like an ‘80s action movie, Terminator kind of feel when he brought it in, and he wanted to get away from that. Plus, we had to reconcile this gunslinger image from his previous ads with this family man idea.

Watching his previous commercial, it’s clear that the sledgehammer/song are used to help construct that continuity. The narrative also works for his commercial purposes: to engage his local audiences to trust him for legal services. If you want your attorney to be as a justice-seeking warrior, this commercial locates those traits within familiar action-flick imagery. Taking on the personae of the “gunslinger” and the vigilante makes for good drama: but how is this credible in a lawyer?

Image Credit: Screenshot from Vimeo

There’s a reason the commercial is so over-the-top: it seems to be part of the attorney ad genre, especially as covered by blogs like Above the Law. Breaking Bad’s sleazy lawyer Sal Goodman has similarly dramatic commercials, featuring the character in front of a Constitution-filled background invoking the tagline “Better Call Saul!”:

Locally here in Austin, we have several equally colorful attorneys who seem to take the city’s unofficial “Keep It Weird” logo as part of their ethos. One such attorney, David Komie of Komie & Morrow, has billboards around Austin that celebrate the fact that he is “the attorney that rocks.”

Image Credit: Austin Chronicle

His dreadlocked visage and leather jacket here perform a rock-and-roll image to appeal to the residents of the Live Music Capital of the World; even though the banner on his firm’s website puts him in a more traditional blue button-up, his biography mentions the name of his band. As Austin sketch comedy group Hustle Show puts it,

At least as far as the ads are concerned, David Komie combines two fun archetypes: the “Better call Saul!”-style billboard lawyer, who’s just trying to make his name and number more memorable than the next guy, and the middle-aged Austin rocker dude who has a square day job but, because it's Austin, wants to let you know that after he punches that clock, things are going get a little crazy.

Another local attorney, Adam Reposa, uses a more traditionally Texan image for his commercials:

The self-proclaimed DWI Badass here relies on a fabulous biker mustache, black cowboy hat, and gruff demeanor to convey that not only is he a lawyer, but one to be feared when you try and stop Americans from enjoying their freedoms. Here, he drives a monstrously large truck and repeatedly slams it into the smaller economy car, to emblematize his approach to the legal system. It’s not a little scary and, as my attorney friend informed me, against the rules of the State Bar of Texas to advertise in such an undignified fashion. (Perhaps it's no accident that Reposa has been held in contempt of court for lewd handgestures.)

Image Credit: Vice Magazine

Why are videos/images like these so prevalent within the genre? Perhaps it’s just to attract Hollywood deals and reality show producers. But not all of these characters actually become entertainment characters. In part, these videos get made because they draw attention, they work. There seems to me to be a classist angle to this: if you’re not familiar with the legal system or without financial means, you’re likely to find out about attorneys through popular media. You might be suspicious of a lawyer with “decorum,” because you want an attorney who can identify with your experiences and needs. If you have access to money or are of a certain class, you want a “tasteful” lawyer, the kind you might find in a biglaw firm who doesn’t need to advertise for business. If you find yourself mocking Jamie Casino, perhaps it’s a sign you don’t actually need legal representation. If you have been injured by your interactions with a corporate entity, you probably do want a legal superhero to save you.

In that case: rock on, David Komie. Rock on.

Beyonce's ***Flawless Feminism

Rachel Schneider — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 23:46:19 +0000

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

I’m so glad to be back on viz again after some time away, especially as having to write posts again gives me the chance to discuss Beyoncé Knowles’s newest record, Beyoncé, which was released without any press or preview in late December as a “visual album.” The album has 14 songs and 17 videos included in it. While critics had things to say about Jay-Z’s verse on “Drunk in Love” and the remixed audio from the 1986 Challenger disaster in “XO,” the most noticeable song was “***Flawless,” which features an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on feminism. Paste Magazine’s review of the album noted the album’s feminist thematics, which others have discussed as well. Since I’d like to add to this conversation about Beyoncé’s feminism, I thought I’d take up how Beyoncé’s visuals, especially in “***Flawless,” depict those concerns.

Image Credit: Beyonce's SoundCloud

Some necessary backstory for the song, however: the major verses actually were first previewed in May 2013 in a track called “Bow Down/I Been On.” The cover depicts the singer wearing a pretty pink dress while surrounded by trophies; yet the proud young girl’s visage is contrasted by the song’s bridge:

Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
H-town vicious, h-h-town vicious
I’m so crown, bow bow down bitches

The rough vocals emphasize the “H-town vicious” identity she’s claiming here as she announces her superiority; the “crown” imagery links to her husband’s own assertions of power as it also reinforces her position as Queen Bey. The heavily modulated vocal pitches her braggadocio into masculine tones, juxtaposing her aggression here with the girl power rhetoric of her earlier song catalogue. Critiquing Beyoncé’s language here, Rahiel Tesfamariam notes, “While intentionally deciding to have an all-woman band was a cutting-edge and progressive decision for Beyoncé to make, why would she undermine it by releasing a song that says she reigns supreme over other women?” How can we reconcile the female slur with the empowerment that Beyoncé purports to offer as a declared feminist?

The song’s remix into “***Flawless,” which pairs these lines with both Adichie’s discourse and video from Beyoncé’s 1993 appearance on Star Search, turns Beyoncé’s declaration of superiority into an invitation for other women to join her in accepting themselves as “flawless.” Even as the framing video points out a less successful moment (her group loses out to the generic metal band Skeleton Crew) for the star, we read it within her larger career arc as an incredibly successful performer. The Beyoncé who confronts the camera here is familiar: tiny shorts, beautiful wavy long hair, heavy jewelry. However, her plaid shirt and wide eyes are tougher and more aggressive from, say, the Beyoncé of “XO.” The camera weaves back and forth towards her as if in battle and the dancing at the video’s end where she’s surrounded by four dancers seems to remix the famous “Single Ladies” dance—the hands here more back and forth faster, the movements are jerkier.

Image Credit: Perez Hilton

The shift into the Adichie excerpt in the song’s middle creates a visual and aural correction to these earlier moments. If Beyoncé dominates the screen early on, we see punk-looking men and women moshing and Beyoncé is only occasionally visible within the crowd. Other women present the same confident direct gaze to the camera as Adichie declares, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’” Reading this in contrast with the earlier lyrics, it’s as if Beyoncé is responding to her critics. In other words, when Beyoncé asks women to “bow down, bitches,” she’s not demeaning other women. She’s just repping her own greatness, and in so doing, encouraging other women to see that as being possible for them, too. Likewise, when Adichie mentions that “We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are,” the album’s other songs like “Rocket,” “Blow,” and “Drunk in Love” show Beyoncé as sexually aggressive in the marital bed, “graining on that wood.” The kind of feminism that Beyoncé constructs within “***Flawless” unapologetically claims visual, verbal, and sexual equality with men.

Image Credit: Screenshot from "Drunk in Love" video

If the early song declares her own process, the hook where she croons, “I woke up like this, I woke up like this / We flawless, ladies tell ‘em,” shifts into the inclusive “we.” All the ladies (single or not) are flawless, too. The title’s three asterisks perhaps don’t just stand in for the three-star rating Girls’ Tyme received. They also serve as an ellipsis for listeners to read into: do the asterisks acknowledge how woman’s flawlessness is always conditional, represent Beyoncé’s humility, or note her own work-in-progress as a black feminist?

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

However, as I’ve been writing this blog post today, I’ve been following some of the commentary on Richard Sherman’s boasts at the NFC title game, where an amazing play on his part prevented a San Francisco 49ers touchdown. Sherman, a cornerback for the Super Bowl-bound Seattle Seahawks, declared himself “the best corner in the game” in an interview with ESPN’s Erin Andrews, and talked some trash about the 49ers’ Michael Crabtree. Many media personalities have been hand-wringing about Sherman’s “classlessness.” An intersectional reading of “***Flawless” might also point out how the title’s asterisks note the problems of African-American success: to demand your competitors to acknowledge your greatness and to “bow down” invites heavy criticism. Perhaps Beyoncé’s visual and verbal immodesty might then be true feminism: asserting equality of excellence across race and gender.

Documentation of Loss – Observing Failure in the Modern Olympics

Laura Thain — Fri, 15 Nov 2013 14:17:50 +0000

Olympic fencer Shin A-Lam of South Korea remains in the arena to contest an unfavorable ruling without the expected stoicism. Image credit: Korea Bang

What does it mean to document loss? What is its rhetorical function? Rhetoric of Celebrity student Iva Kinnaird assembles an archive of defeat from several Olympic games, tracing the intersections of celebrity and sportsmanship. The documentation of loss, she asserts, commodifies defeat and makes it available for public consumption. The result is a strange rhetorical landscape where the lines between winning and losing become less easy to determine.

“The important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle; the essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”

- Pierre de Coubertin, Father of the modern Olympic Games

Photo Finish

With athletes seemingly nearing the uppermost limits of a performance asymptote, it is necessary to improve technology to measure these near indiscernible differences. When one hundredth of a second is the difference between gold and silver, the cameras must be able to record that highly precise moment.

Image Source: Openwaterpedia

Photographs tend to resist abstraction, non-figuration. Photography is unique in its ability to capture the image of something realistically. It can mechanically or exactly record things without the influence of a human bias, although man’s interpretation of said image is another story.

Voyeurism

Image Source: Undisputed Legal

Cameras measure success through the information that they record. With a broader definition how that can be measured, it could be said that an athlete’s strength in character (despite their athletic performance) is what makes them successful.

The emotional nature of some events has “raised spectator voyeurism to an uncomfortable level” (Williams). The viewers want to relate on an emotional level, and that involves seeing the joy or, in many cases, the disappointment in the eyes of the competitors. The close proximity of the cameras is a simple formal way of placing the viewer in the middle of the action, allowing them to more easily feel the weight of any given emotion.

Beautiful Losers

Image Source: Variations on Normal

The trend of honoring dramatic losses and idolizing athletes who lose heroically has not gone unnoticed.

A proposed fourth podium for “when an athlete is either extremely rubbish or gets an injury, but still finishes the race” seems to be an idea that is already metaphorically taking place (Wilcox). It is an occurrence which seems to elicit support from the crowd despite their differences in nationality.

Image Source: Ameblo

Derek Redman, a frontrunner in the 400m sprint at the 1992 Barcelona games is now famously an icon for perseverance and who defines “the essence of the human and Olympic spirit.” Despite coming in last, he provided the public with one of those moments that “remind us what the Olympics are all about” (Barcelona).

This is a problematic situation where the public has turned his devastation into an inspirational moment, denying him agency in the process. His heartbreaking loss is now our Visa commercial.

From a viewer’s perspective, limping across the finish line was a show of his grace in defeat. Interviews with Redmond reveal a different reason for his struggle: his “belief that if he limped fast enough he might still overtake four people and qualify for the final.” (Burnton). It was not heroic strength in character that drove him; it was his delusion acting as a shield from despair.

There is a noble thought that elevating these moments will act as some sort of consolation prize, but what it is really doing is trapping the athlete in that moment by limiting the public’s perception within the confines of a single memorable event. This stagnant image prevents them from moving on.

The video of the race on YouTube sentimentalizes the moment right up to the point of being mawkish. As if the raw footage of a man’s crushed dreams is not enough to convey the heartbreak of the moment, Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” is overlaid.

The footage is edited to elicit sympathy and admiration towards Derek. The video of the race is interlaid with text explaining each moment of the travesty. At the end the text reads “When you don’t give up, YOU CANNOT FAIL!” (Warning). This slogan, of course, is completely illogical; a person is perfectly capable of failing just as many times as they try*[1]. The inspirational message is understood nonetheless. The result of all this is a contrived sappy documentation skewing the memory of the event (Brackets).

When losing is losing

Image Source: Postgrad Problems

Winners who lose - McKayla

McKayla Maroney was the obvious favorite to win the gold in the vault competition. She was expected to win by a wide margin. But when it came down to her actual performance on the day, she faltered. Even in her failure we have elevated her to fame. She is famous for being disappointed with her medal. “She’s so good that she’s probably the only one who doesn’t even have to perform to win the gold” (Macur). An audience can become accustomed to an athlete’s high performance when they are consistently exceptional. Viewed individually, they would all be spectacular, but when seen one after the other they become desensitized to the awesomeness of their capabilities. We expect them to win by exceptional standards. It all goes back to a person’s expectations for their performance relative to others. As was the case with Maroney, one's expectations may be so high that anything less than gold becomes unimpressive.

When winning is losing

Image Source: Fit Sugar

One of the most famous moments in the modern history of gymnastics is Kerri Strug’s 1996 Vault. The defining moment of her career came down to her performing a gold winning vault with an injured leg. The moment of victory was replayed in a countdown of the “30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments” (Brackets). We are given these stories in the format of a countdown which attempts to quantify the weight of an emotional connection. The video documenting the event plays up Kerri’s struggle and the victory that it earns her and her country. The darker reality that is seldom talked about in relation to this moment is the implications of the injury Strug incurred. She snagged the gold in the team final but was unable to compete in her individual event.

It is replayed as a victory for the American team, and it was, in a way, but it was also a crushing defeat for the athlete on an individual level. At the bottom of the video “Due to her injury, Kerri Strug was unable to compete in the individual all-around competition and event finals, despite having qualified for both.” Once again, inspirational music is overlaid. With both this video and the Derek Redmond clip, the moment is sentimentalized to mask the disparity between what occurred to the athlete and the way an audience wishes to perceive that occurrence.

When losing is winning (maybe) - Badminton

Image Source: Yahoo! Sports

The Greeks aspired to win for the sake of eternal glory. “They were also given all manner of material rewards by the cities they represented, but the original goal was to establish everlasting fame on earth, the sure route to immortality” (Williams). In this case, competing well in their sport consequently proving their athleticism was the way to remain in the public’s consciousness. Now, with different modes of achieving longevity in the public eye through celebrity, there are different, less straightforward, ways of being remembered. This begs the question - do you have to win in your event if the goal is to be remembered? The answer, given the current climate of celebrity culture: of course not. People are remembered for anything seen as being an outlier in the traditional winner narrative. One major qualifier to the winner’s narrative is the basic requirement that they must win.

In the scandalous badminton tournament placement match which the Chinese and South Korean women’s teams both ‘threw’, the players became infamous for their strategy of losing. What infuriated viewers most was not that they lost, but that they did so without even trying to conceal their intent. It is rare for blatant misconduct to occur at this level, and “in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport” (Belson). The misconduct is “complicated by the fact that the rules of the sport seemed to give the athletes an incentive to lose” (Belson). Although the teams were disqualified for their actions, they achieved something that no other badminton teams ever have. They created a story interesting enough to live on in the memory of the viewer. The commentator said of the strategy during the match, “This, I’m very sorry to say, could be one of the biggest news stories of the games so far” The YouTube replays of the match in question revealed it was eighteen times as popular as the video of the final match in which determined the gold medalist. By the Greek standards of what is implicit with victory, it is arguable that, although the players lost, they still reached an early goal of the games, and therefore won. The idea of victory and of failure is relative and dependent on what makes up one’s own personal goals.

With the increasing capabilities to deliver information to an audience, there is a focus on reactions to loss and the sportsmanship that goes along with it. The myth of how an athlete won or lost overshadows their results. The Olympics has become not just about winning or losing--it is more about how that win or loss is recorded and repeated back to an audience .

[1] This is dependent on a person’s definition of failure. A quick Google dictionary search brings the result “lack of success” is broad enough to allow their use to be true.

Works Cited

"Barcelona 1992 ." Derek Anthony Redmond. Olympic.org, n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Belson, Ken. "Olympic Ideal Takes Beating In Badminton." The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Aug. 2012. Web. 29 Apr. 2013.

Brackets, Joe. "30 Greatest NBC Olympic Moments." N.p., 23 Apr. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Burnton, Simon. "50 Stunning Olympic Moments No3: Derek Redmond and Dad Finish 400m." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 12 May 0030. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Macur, Juliet. "American Slips at the Finish, Losing Her Grip on the Gold." The New York Times. The New York Times, 06 Aug. 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

"Pierre De Coubertin." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 23 Apr. 2013. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

WARNING: You Will Cry While Watching This. Perf. Derek Redmond and Josh Groban. YouTube. YouTube, 22 May 2012. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Wilcox, Dominic. "Beautiful Losers." Variations on Normal. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Williams, Gregory. "Better Luck Next Time." Cabinet Summer 2002: n. pag. Cabinet Magazine. Web. 27 Apr. 2013.

Rhetorical Collusion

james.wiedner — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 00:35:25 +0000

Image Credit: Screencapture of graph created by the Collusion for Mozilla add-in.

I'd speculate that every instructor is familiar with the feeling that comes with anticipation and apprehension battling each other out before the first day of the semester. Maybe I'm just too easily flustered, but the prospect of standing up in front of a group of heretofore-unknown students, while pretending to be the infallible instructor of heretofore-unknown material always rattles my cage a bit.

Of the two aforementioned fears, the latter is always more menacing than the former for me (to the extent that you can actually separate them). This being the case, I was thrilled to find out before the start of the Fall 2012 semester (my first semester as a PhD student and as a UT Associate Instructor) that the book I would be engaging with my introductory rhetoric students was Eli Pariser's "The Filter Bubble."

The reason that this was such good news for me was that I had already read the book earlier in the summer for "fun." And this was no superficial reading, either; my paranoia and indignation over the sort(s) of information gathering and content filtering taking place on the Internet had led me to copiously annotate the book throughout. For the first time in my life, there was the distinct possibility that being a cynical alarmist would work to my advantage!

What's more, I was certain my students would be every bit as enthusiastic about the subject matter as I was. Hell, I thought to myself, they'll be far more knoweledgable in these areas than I am! I had better bone up on both the technical and cultural state of online affairs, 'lest their suspicions that their rhetoric instructor was a total douchemobile become certainties.

However, I soon found that, despite (or perhaps because of) their total immersion in the technology that drives our day-to-day lives, I knew more than they did with respect to the "ins-and-outs" of our digital lives. This was a dubious discovery: it meant that I didn't have to worry as much about sounding like a clueless Luddite on par with their parents, but I would have to really work to get them involved in the course materials.

But we forged ahead. There were times when I'd see signs of life, usually at those points in lecturing wherein I'd inadvertently get so worked up talking about these issues about which I was so emphatic, that they took my paranoia for passion, and there eyes would follow my flailing arms with what looked like rapt attention.

By week 3, however, I realized that I wasn't the impassioned, young, mind-opening instructor that I had fancied myself. Rather, I was the neurotic, old (yes, when you're 18, 34 is old) instructor that really needed to get a life if he was this excited about online marketing tactics. It was high time that I employ the incredibly advanced equipment in the classroom I was given to teach in by the DWRL.

I showed them a TED Talk given by Eli Pariser on the very subject he engages in his book:

They took in more during the first 5 minutes of Pariser's talk than they did the first chapters of his book. I don't mean this as any sort of criticism of Pariser's writing. To the contrary, the speech served as the spark that got my students to reallyread his book; seeing an actual person has added a face to the pages. The book transfomed from textbook to extended blog. They were now reading, digesting, and synthesizing the course materials, as was evidenced by the next essays they submitted.

Still, I could tell that they were looking at this whole thing in a "this is interesting, but they're not actually tracking me" sort of way. For them, "The Filter Bubble" was eye-opening, but they still weren't grasping the full extent of what this book was telling us. They weren't thinking about what it meant for a company to go past the anonymous tracking, to a point where somebody out their knew your name, address, hobbies, names of relatives, etc.

Wanted terribly to get them to that next step, I put together a lesson plan that was going to be multimedia in nature. I began with another TED Talk. This one was by Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, who was unveiling a new Firefox add-on called "Collusion,"

Collusion was created by Atul Varma, who says that it was reading "The Filter Bubble" that inspired him to crerate the program. Collusion examines some of the websites that silently track visitors long after they've left a site. More unsettling, Kovac's visual representation revealed the groups collecting information and following their every move around the Internet were sites that they'd never even visited.

I encouraged them to download the Collusion add-on and see what they found. We all took a screen shot of our "Collusion charts" at the end of a typical day of Internet usage (my chart is at the top of this post; to be fair, my chart represents heavier Internet usage than typical), and posted them on the course wiki. As I did not wanted to be yet another authority forcing them to divulge personal information, this assignment was 100% optional, and they had the option to submit anonymously, if they so desired.

The chart illustrating the extent of sites gathering my information without my knowledge (much less consent) wouldn't completely fit onto my screen. Hence, they aren't completely depicted on the screen capture above, which is unfortunate, because one of the most unsettling aspects of these charts is the visualization of the extent to which the web sites collecting my data were several steps removed from any site I ever visited...and they were sharing with sites even further removed from any online activity I personally engaged in.

With the Collusion charts, students saw all-too-clearly what they had previously understood only in the abstract. So long as it remained an abstract notion, it was never going to inspire a feeling of having a vested interest in these practices. Now that they'd seen what was going on, they were mad as hell, and were sufficiently knowledgeable that they could articulate the reasons behind their opinions effectively.

However, after a day or two of almost managing to convince myself that it was my vast knowledge and dynamic classroom persona that had made the course materials "real" for my students, I finally embraced the fact that the kudos would be more appropriately directed toward the videos and interactive add-ons that we had incorporated into our class time.

(As an aside, I felt compelled to temper their newfound disdain for the entities engaged in the practices exposed in "The Filter Bubble" with editorials defending those practices. I (hopefully) conveyed to my class that there are always multiple sides to any issue, and that the ability to argue one's opponent's case was the hallmark of a skilled rhetorician.)

Remediation, New Media, and “Lorem Ipsum" as Censorship of Transparency

Laura Thain — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 19:54:01 +0000

Image Credit: Per Erik Strandberg

“Lorem ipsum” has been recognized by publishers and graphic designers throughout the 20^th century as the industry standard text by which to mock up text layout, thanks to a small UK company called Letraset, which mass-manufactured dry transferrable lettering from the 1960s to the 1990s. With the advent of digital media and desktop publishing, the first two words of the ubiquitous sequence have become recognizable to the population at large. It appears in markup templates almost universally across publishing platforms. Templates in word processing, presentation software, and web design all bear the mark of their print forbearers. Thus, lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, a scrambled copy of an excerpt from Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum (“of the ends of good and evil”) has entered into popular discourse as a recognizable placeholder, as Wikipedia says, “used to demonstrate the graphics elements of a document or visual presentation…by removing the distraction of meaningful content.”

This post would like to explore lorem ipsum as an ideological concept in both print and digital media. In part, this exploration will question what it means to view text itself as visual rhetoric. How can text draw attention to or defer attention from itself as a visual object? How can conventions of representation make text, like lorem ipsum, disappear? Might we view such disappearance as a sort of censorship? If so, how can we describe the internal logic of such censorship as an ideological trend in the digital age?

Lorem ipsum corresponds to a larger concept in mass media—that of transparency and immediacy. According to Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, modern society exhibits a dual impulse regarding media representation. On the one hand, audiences demand multimodal approaches (the multiplication of medium), but they also demand hyperrealistic representation. In such hyperrealistic representations, the medium becomes transparent, delivering the message it carries with as little perceivable mediation as possible. “Our culture,” Bolter and Grusin argue, “ideally…wants to erase its media in the very act of multiplying them.” Society’s demand for “invisible” mediation leads to medium transparency and immediacy—the medium delivers an object that seems immediately present because the medium focuses attention on the object, not the delivery of that object. Virtual reality, hyperrealism in film, and reality television are all examples of immediacy because the medium’s internal logic “dictates that the medium itself should disappear,” condensing the distance between the imagined and the real.

Lorem ipsum itself represents a conundrum, because as a text, it exhibits transparent qualities. But this strategy is designed to draw attention to the medium in which it appears—the very opposite of the relationship Bolter and Grusin describe between hypermediation and immediacy in Remediation. In the case of text as a visual object, then, we must amend the terms Bolter and Grusin give us to account for text as a form of mediation. When text appears contentless, it calls attention to the medium that contains it, rather than to itself. This relationship denies text as a medium in itself, rendering it an object of visual rhetoric used to display the mediating power of the medium in which it appears.

What ideological corollaries to the concept of lorem ipsum can we identify and digital and print media? Where can we see this phenomenon replicated? One clear example is in internet advertising. As we read, we consistently “filter out” the content of advertisements using recognizable advertisement form, interpreting the object only as an “ad” without paying any attention to its content. Take, for instance, this example:

Image Credit: Screencapture from CNN.com, as captured by LT

Because audiences familiar with current modes of internet advertising have become accustomed to the disruptive ad, in most cases they feel the immediate impulse to “skip” or exit the ad. The same is true of timed advertisment—attention is more likey to be placed on the “skip ad” countdown than on the advertisement itself, even as it briefly forces itself upon the viewer.

Image Credit: Screen capture from Youtube, as captured by LT.

Streaming sites abound with a manipulation of this effect, disguising advertising with the mask of what the viewer is actually looking for. As consumers adapt to strategies implemented by ad produces and producers revise their strategies according to those adaptations, the boundaries between advertising, entertainment, and news media blur considerably. Which of these, for instance, represents the actual link to download the desired object?

What arises is a form of self-censorship. Audiences constantly filter their line of vision, giving attention to what they are looking for and ignoring or willing transparent the constant web of distraction that surrounds it. Perhaps this—the interpretation of a media object as unimportant or ignorable—has always been the most insidious form of censorship.

As Bolter and Grusin point out, the 20^th century has no monopoly on hypermediation. 18^th century print culture exhibited a mass market that demanded consumers make calculated choices about what they consumed; these choices multiplied exponentially in the 19^th century. But never before has hypermediation existed across so many media simultaneously, making a transition between self-“filter bubble”-censorship and external censorship, whether on moral, political, or ethical grounds, possible.

I would like to suggest that we can see examples of this external censorship capitalizing on established, cognition-oriented modes of self-censorship in play in multiple arenas. For example, Managing Director of the Mormon Family and Church History Department Richard Turley responded to John Krakauer's controversial investigation of violence in the Mormon faith in Under the Banner of Heaven by arguing that "...[a]lthough the book may appeal to gullible persons who rise to such bait like trout to a fly hook, serious readers who want to understand Latter-day Saints and their history need not waste their time on it." Here, Turley criticizes Krakauer's book using language that differentiates the elite, skeptical, knowledgable reader from ordinary mass-readership (for him, "gullible persons"), and, by such a logic, condemns Krakauer's text for its content by means of its medium; that is, pop journalism. In this portion of his critique, he censors by rendering the text itself irrelevent or, perhaps, invisible.

This highlights a larger trend in modern acts of censorship, broadly defined: popular culture is often degraded as not worthy of attention due to its mass appeal and ordinary audience. The most effective critiques of mass-market literature, such as the Twilight series and Fifty Shades of Gray, for instance, often hang a banner above these works declaring them “unworthy of attention” rather than immoral or distasteful; the latter labels often prove to evoke more, rather than less, interest in a work, whereas declaring them “wastes of time” has a greater affect on deterring particular readers.

As literary or media scholars we tend to exhibit great skepticism toward censorship that denies audiences the ability to, to put it simply, “think for themselves.” We decry modes of censorship that oppose audience agency in negotiating semiotic systems and cultural, ethical, or moral codes. We should, then, be equally vigilant against this “lorem ipsum” censorship. It is a censorship that attempts to ascribe and emphasize medium (that popular culture is synonymous with discardable literature; that challenges which question the terms of an argument exist outside the realm of civil discourse) at the expense of content; it asks us to interpret text itself as transparent; contentless; uninteresting. Such arguments ask us to ignore “the man behind the curtain,” rather than blindly opposing him; it is these arguments that may be the most dangerous of all.

Visualizing the War on Christmas: Acknowledging the Pre-Christian Origins of Winter Festival Imagery

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 19:41:22 +0000

Image Credit: Fox News

Every holiday season conservative political activists trying to maintain Christian supremacy in the United States bemoan an alleged "War On Christmas." According to their conspiracy theories, evil secularlists lurk behind every corner, ready to pounce on any expression of the Christian Christmas tradition. For the activists, store employees who wish customers a "happy holiday" are not trying to be inclusive. Rather, these cheerless corporate-mandated greetings serve as another boot of tyranny standing on the neck of American Christendom.

Image Credit: nknh

Such bluster is par for the course when the religious right are concerned: it is as loud as it is baseless. However, the hullabaloo does contribute to the marginalization and under-appreciation of the diverse historical sources of the imagery currently associated with Christmas that originated with various European celebrations of the winter solstice.

Image Credit: Simon Phipps

Despite what certain bumper stickers and church signs might tell you, Jesus is not the reason for the season. Early Christian celebrations of Christmas appropriated preexisting winter festival traditions, such as Roman Saturnalia or the Norse celebrations that preceded Yule.

Image Credit: Aaron Jacobs

These solstice celebrations marked the return of longer days and the promise of a bountiful growing season. Evergreen trees and shrubs, such as the pine tree and holly bush, serve as a reminder that life only slumbers but does not perish in the coldest, darkest days of winter.

Image Credit: Duncan Hall

Pagan winter traditions, though, aren't all light and joy. If you think coal in a stocking would be a disappointment, just be thankful that you don't have to deal with Krampus.

Let me close by wishing all a happy holiday season, no matter what holiday you celebrate, and offer my hopes for peace on Earth and goodwill to all.

Image Credit: Seattle Atheists

We Have Sold The Future: The Uses of Future Hopes and Fears in Petroleum Industry Advertising

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 02:59:39 +0000

Image Credit: Shell

The future of Norman Bel Geddes' Futurama is optimistic. Clean architecture and efficient technology aid people as they move through the business of their day. As promised in a series of 1937 Shell advertisements in Life magazine using the words of Bel Geddes, the city of tomorrow will alleviate many commuting frustrations. Until that city emerges, however, the ads offer Shell gasoline as a way to save money and reduce wear and tear on car engines while stuck in stop-and-go traffic. This use of a hopeful future contrasts with the darker tomorrows that lurk behind many of today's petroleum advertisements, drawing attention to the double-edged sword of appeals to the future.

Image Credit: Shell

In the 1937 ads, the Shell Corporation promotes its product as a stopgap to deal with the failings of the present until the the arrival of a better future. The first ad quotes Bel Geddes promising that by 1960 stoplights will be a thing of the past, as cars use underpasses and express streets to reach their destinations. The second ad has Bel Geddes reassure us that "children won't play in the streets" and pedestrians will not impede the flow of traffic. A third ad shown below places Bel Geddes in profile next to a quote about pedestrians, express and local traffic all having their own paths.

Image Credit: Shell

Two ads contrast photographs of overcrowded and traffic-choked streets of the late 1930s with the clean, efficient cityscape sketches and models of Bel Geddes. In two of the ads, a third visual bridges the present and future: photos of smiling, happy motorists posed in their cars with Shell gasoline pumps in the background. The ad text spells out the argument: "The regular use of Super-Shell will cut the cost of your stop and go. There's a Shell dealer near you."

Image Credit: Chevron

That such hassle-free commutes failed to materialize is personally a source of disappointment (especially as I dodge vehicular traffic while walking to the bus stop each morning), but the failure of the future to live up to our highest hopes isn't terribly surprising. What does provide some measure of uncertainty, if not surprise, is the choice advertisers or any other rhetor has to make when using an appeal to the future: do we look forward with hope or trepidation? The Shell ads of 1937 presented the company's product as a bridge to a better future, but many oil ads today offer products as a bulwark against encroaching problems.

Image Credit: Chevron

The petroleum industry now wrestles with a future fraught with the threat of global climate change, industrial disasters and resource depletion, even as technological innovation also promises to open up new areas for resource extraction and create greater fuel efficiency. Chevron's website speaks to many of the issues the future brings when it comes to the petroleum industry: Energy Supply and Demand, Energy Policy, Energy Efficiency and Conservation, Emerging Energy, Environment, Climate Change, and others. The first Chevron image above acknowledges the consumer desire to "use less energy" and it promises that Chevron too will help governments and businesses to become more energy efficient. The ad does not explicitly state that people wish to use less energy to save money (let alone consider the idea that oil reserves will one day run out), and the ad uses a positive, can-do tone. Yet, the ad cannot avoid responding to troubles on the horizon.

A second Chevron image from its Supply and Demand web page acknowledges greater energy demands in the future, showing a picture of skyscrapers under construction that look much more like the buildings of today than the futurism of Bel Geddes in the Shell ads from 1937, reigning in optimism for a more realist and incremental outlook.

The kairos of the two eras influences the choices made by the ad creators—Art Deco's optimism vs. the pessimism of our millennial age. Below in a 2007 ad, Shell promises, "We invest today's profits in tomorrow's solutions," elaborating that "The challenge of the 21st century is to meet the growing need for energy in ways that are not only profitable but sustainable."

Image Credit: Shell

Even this nod to a potentially difficult future is couched in hopeful language befitting an ad promoting a company. Shell speaks of "tomorrow's solutions" and "challenges" not problems, though those problems lurk beneath the surface. Unlike the Shell of 1937 that looks to the forecasts of Bel Geddes futurism, the Shell of 2007 century takes on the task of describing and shaping the future. And, their future promises not utopian transformation but a kind of stasis, holding onto energy production that is at once sustainable, profitable, and able to meet the "growing need for energy." Another 70 years, and likely considerably less time, will tell whether such a prediction is any less utopian than a smooth rush hour commute.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Negotiating Modesty: Reading Mormon Fashion Blogs as Visual Rhetoric

Laura Thain — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 00:22:32 +0000

Image Source: Clothed Much

Fashion blogs have proliferated the internet since its inception; the rhetoric of the genre is as multifaceted as its participants, most of whom are women. Daily fashion blogging, in which the blogger takes regular photos of the outfit she assembles each morning, is a popular iteration of the genre. Obviously much of the blogger’s value systems is exhibited through the personal ethos she cultivates on these blogs; the way the blogger frames the narrative of the outfit in terms of its relationship to her day-to-day activities reveals much about these value systems, as well. An interesting subculture has received a substantial amount of attention in the fashion blogging community recently, and that is modesty blogging. All the modesty blogs I’ve come across are motivated by religious restriction; the vast majority of these base their definitions of modest clothing upon the tenets of the Mormon church. Of course, the situated ethos of modesty blogging must negotiate an inherent contradiction between two competing definitions of modest: the function of modest dress as a physical representation of religious belief and the concept of modesty as the quality of being unassuming, scrupulous, and free from presumption. What does it mean to take pride in modest dress, to wear it as a badge of individualism and difference? And how can we read these modesty blogs in terms of visual culture? Join me as I take you on a journey into another strange corner of the internet: Mormon fashion blogging.

Image Source: Cats and Cardigans

We might make a few generalizations about popular fashion blogs: most successful blogs attract their audiences with an ethos that exhibits an internally consistent personal style (what we might call a “style narrative”) that is accomplished by innovative pairings. Thus, the blog initially attracts an audience with the familiar—a “style narrative” of, for example, grunge, retro, hipster, or editorial—and keeps their interest with the unfamiliar—a scarf made into a bolero or a vintage headband woven into a punk outfit. We might, then, loosely read the ethos of these blogs as “text” in terms of Barthes’ conforming/cutting edge dichotomy in The Pleasure of the Text. This makes the case of modesty fashion blogs especially interesting, because the “cutting edge” component of these blog’s ethos is, in fact, a conservative reaction to counterculture—it operates on the fantasy of return to a dress standard of the past (although its location in the past is certainly ambiguous). The familiar, plagiarizing edge is, in fact, the way that these modesty blogs attempt to participate in mainstream discourse—a discourse that is often countercultural (hipster, grunge, retro). Their popularity comes in large part from the way these blogs resemble in their formal elements many other successful fashion blogs, but are able to translate their audience’s desire for surprise and innovation into a restricted code of dress.

Image Source: Cotton and Curls

Most Mormon fashion blogs define immodest clothing as anything low-cut, sleeveless, backless, or too short—some combine a series of positive descriptions along with the negative (for instance “long skirts” or “skirts below the knee” rather than “no skirts above the knee”). Most do not address fit but instead warn against “revealing” clothing. Concrete restrictions almost always regard coverage, rather than the tightness or fit of clothing. This ethos in general is oriented around fulfilling a minimum requirement of modesty, and the boundary of that minimum requirement is represented physically by the temple garment, an undergarment standardized and manufactured by the central Church. Women begin wearing this garment daily when they receive their endowment, which for most coincides with their marriage. We can reasonably assume that most of these bloggers wear temple garments, as they advertise their status as Temple-married women, but it is worth mentioning that almost none of these bloggers mention the temple garment or the way it might restrict their code of dress; rather, these women speak of their restricted dress as a lifelong commitment predating their temple endowment, and a code of modesty that is self-defined and self-enforced. (Many of these blogs begin their "about me" with some variation of “Modesty means ____ to me…”).

The deferral of the issue of temple garments is not only a reflection of their sacred status among church members (it is in general considered inappropriate to speak about temple garments to non-members, and is considered offensive to display visual representations of them)—it is also indicative of these women attempting to find a place in mainstream fashion discourse; to not be noticed for their wardrobe restriction but for their good sense of style. The rhetoric of these blogs might be condensed as such: “I am reflecting an internal commitment to God in my physical appearance, but I do this so well that you would not notice unless I told you explicitly.” This rhetorical mechanism seems to operate to ease the tension between competing modesty discourses I have outlined above: these bloggers can take personal, inner pride in their commitment to modesty without bringing attention to their difference (and thus translating pride of self into the public sphere). Counterintuitively, this is accomplished by assimilating successfully into the fashionable discourse of the mainstream.

Image Source: wearing it on my sleeves

But there is a way in which this attitude can be read as subversive in terms of Church doctrine, especially when one considers the history of sumptuary laws in the Mormon Church. (There is a useful article in the Mormon periodical Dialogue that outlines the subject in more detail.) Though we might imagine the discourse on modesty to call back to the conservativism of the Einsenhower era, this is not the locus of the nostalgia for modest behavior—it is, in fact, its origin. The first explicit call to modest dress occured in 1951, when Church authority Spencer W. Kimball extolled young, unmarried Mormon women to distinguish themselves from their non-member peers explicitly through a more conservative code of dress:

"There is no reason why women need to wear a low-cut or otherwise revealing gown just because it is the worldly style. We can create a style of our own."

It is important to note that this address, given at a BYU devotional, was aimed mostly at unmarried young women. As Kimball argues,

"We knew of one mother who remonstrated with her lovely daughter who intended to buy a modest evening gown. The mother pleaded: 'Darling, now is the time to show your pretty shoulders and back and neck. When you are married in the temple that will be time enough to begin wearing conservative clothes.' What can be expected of the new generation if the mothers lead their own offspring from the path of right?...The fellows could show courage and good judgment if they encouraged their young women friends to wear modest clothing. If a young man would not date a young woman who is improperly clothed, the style would change very soon."

Kimball assumes that women who are married are already living the law of modesty because of the nature of their temple garments; here, as in most of the discourse that follows, the concern is that unmarried women might delay that sense of responsibility until after they take their temple vows.

The loose standards that Kimball sets out are a reaction against, rather than a return to, the styles of the 1950s—in fact, his distaste for revealing clothing resembles a return to the fashion of the 1910s, before hemlines were raised and bustlines lowered in the so-called Roaring 20s. And it is certainly of some significance that Kimball himself experienced adolescence in the 1910s—he is demanding, to some extent, a return to the conceptions of modesty that existed during his own days of courtship.

Yet Kimball’s call to arms is all very general. The restrictions that modesty fashion bloggers set out above—specific prohibitions against revealing this part of the body or that—are simply not extant in this early discourse. In fact, the next significant prohibitions against immodesty among LDS youth are even less specific than Kimball’s address above. Let us examine the 1965 iteration of a pamphlet still published today called “For The Strength of Youth,” which serves to outline the standards which young Mormons are expected to uphold.

Image Credit: Barncow

Note the text’s deferral of specific criteria (“it is difficult to make an over-all statement concerning modest standards of dress, because modesty cannot be determined by inches or fit since that which looks modest on one person may not be so on another…”). Instead, the text chooses to deliberately define modesty against the standards of the countercultural movements of the 1960s. It warns against “grubby” fashion, implores women to maintain traditional mores of femininity in their dress, and considers androgyny to be the greatest threat to the modesty of young women.

Image Credit: Barncow

The pamphlet also extols young women to “dress to enhance their natural beauty and femininity…Few girls or women ever look well in backless or strapless dresses. Such styles often make the figure look ungainly or large, or they show the bony structures of the body…Clothes should be comfortable and attractive without calling attention [to the body].” It is also careful to warn women against wearing pants outside of athletic activity: “Pants…are not desirable attire for shopping, at school, in the library, in cafeterias or restaurants.”

Thus we can see that in the 1960s, second-wave feminism and androgynous dress were the chief modes of discourse that the Church set to dress its women against. The letter of the law in these pamphlets is far less respected than the spirit of the law, and the “law” is an attractive but non-sexualized, and therefore sanitized, femininity. Counterculture was at the top of the immodest hierarchy.

Image Source: Haircut and General Attitude

Not so today. Mormon women increasingly define modesty in terms of explicit clothing guidelines (inseam lengths, coverage) rather than cultural association; no longer is clothing a statement of conservative reaction to the styles of counterculture but instead a playful interpretation of them. Cultural associates of modes of dress cease to be called into question within this dialogue; instead, the temple garment becomes the silent marker of how much skin is “too much.” Anything that covers these undergarments constitutes modest dress.

I see the discourse on modesty in the present day taking place, then, in two separate spheres. On the one hand, church-sanctioned periodicals continue to emphasize the function of modesty as a marker of difference against counterculture, although this is a trope that has all but lost its meaning. Meanwhile, fashionable young Mormon women often embrace an identity that is countercultural—they embrace their ability to participate in cutting-edge fashion while still adhering to the explicit restrictions of their faith.

It seems to me that one significant effect of this is, in fact, a return, in a sense, to Kimball’s initial exortations to unmarried women. To the insider Mormon community, these young married bloggers are in a sense instructing their younger or unmarried peers how to live the letter of the law of modesty before they take their temple vows and don their temple garments. For the fashion blogging audience at large, these women express their identity through their commitment to modesty by showing how easily the rhetoric of modesty can fit into the tenets of mainstream fashion; the commitment to coverage exists as a challenge or unexpected element in this endeavor that only enhances their ethos, rather than undermining it, in the mainstream. Modesty then ultimately exists as a function of creativity rather than restriction. And though most of these women are probably unaware of the complex rhetorical history that makes such an ethos possible, they are nonetheless operating in a space in which the definition of modesty has drastically shifted over time, making it possible for these women to, as Benjamin Franklin might say, take pride in their humility—to have no reservations in being immodest in demeanor about their modesty in dress. I will at the very least claim this: that the function of modesty as difference has taken a countercultural turn, and, if a woman being refused entry to a BYU testing center for wearing skinny jeans is any indication, the rhetoric of modesty within the Mormon community is very much a battleground in which the rules of engagement are still being hammered out.

The Secret History of Lines

Laura Thain — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:53:24 +0000

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

With 24 hours to go, media outlets projecting the outcome of election day are covered in geographical maps of states and counties painted starkly in red and blue. I’ve enjoyed the responses of armchair intellectuals like Randall Munroe, who playfully reinterprets the red/blue divide to create a complex and comprehensive visual history of the Republican and Democratic parties. The proliferation of regional and ideological divides across multiple media this week urged me to explore two important questions in visual rhetoric: What does it mean to visualize a geographical boundary? And what does it mean to visualize an invisible line? (I would be remiss not to mention the enormous amount of border studies that exist in postcolonial and Anglophone literature and criticism—but today on viz I will try to confine myself to a discussion of the visualization of intranational borders.) Here to help me is the photography of Colin Stearns, Assistant Professor of Photography at Parsons. Stearns' current project is photographing the Mason-Dixon line in order to capture "this border of cultural distinction at the places of its occurence." Each of his photographs contain the invisible interstate line somewhere within their composition. I'll also put Stearns in dialogue with William Byrd II, the 18^th century commissioner of the colonial line between North Carolina and Virginia.

First, a bit about the Mason-Dixon line’s place in the historical record and in our national imagination. In his artist’s statement, Stearns recognizes the Mason-Dixon line as a “cultural barrier,” a particularly apt term considering the large discrepancy between the actual and the imagined political effect of the drawing of the line. Surveyed between 1763 and 1767, the line’s chief purpose was to settle a land dispute between the Penns of Pennsylvania and the Barons Baltimore of Maryland. The ensuing line established a firm boundary between the colonies of Maryland and Pennsylvania and Delaware as a satellite colony of Pennsylvania with varying levels of independent government in the colonial period. (Delaware’s history of strong government influence from the dynastic governors of both Maryland and Pennsylvania no doubt contributed to the eagerness of its home-grown politicians to be the first to join, as an independent state, the newly formed United States in the 1780s).

Image Source: Wikipedia

But at no point during the colonial period did the Mason-Dixon serve as an actual dividing line between slave and non-slave colonies because there simply did not exist such a delineation. Laws explicitly prohibiting slavery, with the noted exception of Vermont, did not exist in the colonial period. (Vermont’s Constitutional Charter, which declared Vermont separate from New Hampshire early in the Revolutionary War, is one of, if not the first, abolishments of slavery among the British colonies of North America.) It was not until a full two decades after the Mason-Dixon was drawn that Pennsylvania outlawed slavery (1780); Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Hampshire did the same shortly after the recognition of the new Republic in 1783-1784. New York and New Jersey took decades to follow suit (1799 and 1804, respectively), and the line cannot be argued to have the smallest significance in slave/free state designations west of the Appalachians. Delaware, firmly north of the dividing line, did not abolish slavery until the 13^th amendment was passed in 1865. Clearly, the Mason-Dixon line had no correlation to the practice of slavery in the colonial period. It was not until the 19^th century—during Congressional debates culminating in the Missouri Compromise of 1820—that the Mason-Dixon line began to symbolize a politicized North/South divide that claimed slavery as its principle cultural difference.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

So how can we read the Mason-Dixon Line’s historical significance with more care? How can this reading help inform Stearns’ project and in general expand our conception of the visual representations of political boundaries? I answer this question by going even further back into the colonial 18^th century of America and examining the first significant commissioned survey of a colonial boundary—that of North Carolina and Virginia, led by failed governor hopeful and plantation aristocrat William Byrd II of Virginia.

Image Credit: UNC

Byrd published two histories of his 1728 excursion, both of which have become indispensible primary sources of both public and private life in the 18^th century colonial South. (Byrd’s secret diary, which was decoded only in the 20^th century, gives a particularly detailed glimpse into the private thoughts and cultural attitudes of a colonial husband, land owner, and slave holder.) The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina contains an official account of the survey, but the more interesting text is the semi-parodic and much more candid Secret History of the Dividing Line, which Byrd drafted for a small circle of political elite in England. It is of no small significance that it is in the Secret History, not the official account, that Byrd spends considerable time describing difference between the Virginians, who he saw as the gentile elite of the English colonies in North America, and the North Carolinians, who he describes as disorganized, uneducated, and culturally inferior. In addition, the Secret History also emphasizes that the initiative to survey the line originated within the councils of the colonies themselves, not from a royal entity. The importance of colonial sovereignty in the exercise of drawing the dividing line receives great rhetorical attention, and so the end result of these two conflicting impulses in the text is that while the North Carolinians are culturally discredited, their presence in the process of boundary-making is essential to the legality of the line formed. Byrd is thus able to legitimize the survey expedition both culturally and politically, strengthening his claim to the validity of its existence and the importance of the endeavor.

That Byrd considered these elements to belong to a “secret” history—that is, a suppressed or forgotten one—is in no small way related to the immense amount of cultural labor that surrounds the border-making project, and this is the same type of cultural labor that political factions exert and popular imagination perpetuates in the case of the Mason-Dixon line. The line became a crucial piece of evidence for both secessionist and unionist rhetoric during the various secession crises of 1820-1840, and of course, played a role in the ultimate dissolution of the Union in 1861. Beginning in the 1820’s, the survey stood no longer as a triumph of scientific instrumentation (Mason and Dixon’s survey techniques later led to the first accurate calculations of the earth’s density) in drawing an arbitrary geographical border or a legal precedent for settling land disputes between colonies and therefore states. Instead, the line was used to argue that political borders reflected an innate or organic cultural difference between each side’s respective constituents, and thus, strengthened the legitimacy of the artificial divide. And of course, unlike the lines drawn by the Missouri Compromise (1820) and the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), the Mason-Dixon line exists in physical representation, with a stone marker bearing the arms of both Pennsylvania and Maryland placed every 5 miles along the surveyed line.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

And it is artist like Stearns who reveal and interrogate the labor of creating these boundaries. Stearns’ photography does so by several means. First, he utterly avoids the iconic line-markers, choosing instead to allow a mixture of organic and architectural details to connect the physical composition of the photographs to the theoretical subject matter. In highlighting these two types of “line-drawing,” Stearns seems to emphasize both the political border’s reliance on a rhetoric of organic divide (that is, that the cultural distinctions between populations predate the proverbial drawing of a line in the sand) but its essentially constructed nature. Take, for example, this photo:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

Sometimes his photos make a primarily architectural argument:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

And sometimes they seem to make an organic one:

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

But almost always, they combine elements of both.

Image Credit: Colin Stearns

If I can get away with making overarching aesthetic claims here, I would like to posit this: the audience, in the very act of viewing these pictures with the knowledge that they are visualizations of a geographical border, searches for delineation within them, even as they know those delineations are artificial. The audience thus becomes both aware of political boundaries as a cultural construction and aware of their own complicitness in creating them; the pieces no longer become a mere accusation of the stark black-and-white artificiality of manmade divides but an interrogation into the process by which we as members of society participate in the creation and perpetuation of those boundaries, even when they become oppressive.

Munroe's Complex Visual History of the US Congress. Image Credit: XKCD

The lines I’ve examined today helped to create and sustain a cultural and geographical border between the North and the South and designate them as opposing ideological spaces, creating a (bi)polarized and (bi)polarizing political rhetoric that has dominated American politics since the splintering of the Democratic Republican party and Jackson’s presidency during the aforementioned 18^th Congress of the 1820’s (but that’s another long story). Where might we go further with this investigation? Can we use extend these arguments to describe how political boundaries function in 21^st century America? Does, for instance, our current connection between political boundary and ideological identity depend less upon regional dichotomies (North/South, East Coast/West Coast) and more upon population density (urban/rural)? How does this change how we might read these invisible lines?

Secret Ballot, Public Voting: The Subtle and Not-So-Subtle Persuasion of the "I Voted" Sticker

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 16:37:34 +0000

Image Credit: Kevin Lau

The image above of feline Lefty sporting an "I Voted" sticker is not, as some activists might worry, evidence of voter fraud. Rest assured, cats and other domestic animals are not posing as voters. Lefty's message is much less nefarious if vehement: "YES, I am talking to YOU! GO VOTE TODAY!" I already wore my "I Voted Early" sticker last week, thanks to the early voting available in Travis County, Texas. And I look forward to seeing fellow citizens from across the nation sporting "I Voted" stickers tomorrow regardless of their choices inside the voting booth.

Image Credit: missus manukenkun

The "I Voted" sticker offers a small but insistent and numerous reminder to fellow citizens to vote, and the stickers communicate pride in participating in the democratic process. When I wore the sticker into my class last week, I joked with my students about the sticker working to guilt them into voting. I doubt seeing the sticker does much more than remind an audience of the election and evoke whatever attitudes that audience associates with the voting, which for many is cynicism and indifference, especially for races at the federal level.

Image Credit: Tony Alter

I can't entirely disagree with that cynicism either (especially in a non-swing state), though I think it's still important to vote particularly for local races where one's vote has more influence, and I'm not alone in that decision going by those sporting "I Voted" stickers on Flickr (a selection of which is included below).

Image Credit: Tony Delgrosso

Image Credit: Tracy Apps

The Secretary of State Office in Washington State has even offered an e-sticker for your Facebook page.

Image Credit: Washington State Secretary of State

The "I Voted Early" sticker I wore here in Texas is somewhat larger than the "I Voted" stickers common in other regions. But, I have to express some envy at the huge "I Voted" stickers available to voters in Clark County, NV, such as Julie Vazquez shows off below.

Image Credit: Julie Vazquez

Selling Beer and Selling Democracy: American Bald Eagle Logos Today and Yesterday

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 16:13:37 +0000

Image Credit: Commission on Presidential Debates

Despite its vaguely governmental-sounding name, the Commission on Presidential Debates is a private, non-profit corporation funded by a handful of businesses, as described by George Farah. The Commission serves to accommodate the Republican and Democratic Parties' desire for a relatively controlled event—control which drove the League of Women Voters to withdraw from hosting the debates in 1987. One of the long-standing contributors to the Commission is the Anheuser-Busch corporation (owned since 2008 by the Brazilian and Belgian conglomerate InBev). While watching the debates, I couldn't help but notice the similarity between the eagle that hangs above the heads of the candidates and the Anheuser-Busch eagle, both of which draw on deeply set US political imagery.

Image Credit: Frank Peters

I'm not suggesting here that the debate eagle is some sort of subliminal advertising for Anhauser-Busch, though the correspondences are remarkable in terms of the eagle's posture. However, these correspondences are likely due more to the larger genre of American bald eagle imagery than an effort to associate the debates with one of America's most sold beers. In the debates the eagle serves as a sort of unofficial official seal when the presidential seal would be inappropriate (as both candidates are, supposedly, equally potential presidents even if one currently holds the office). Slate attempted to track down the origin of the eagle as used by the Commission, and while they located several historical precedents, the Commission gave Slate a rather ambiguous answer that the eagle is "an amalgam based on something they found in the Smithsonian Museum."

Image Credit: Cornell University Library

As Slate describes, the image of an eagle clutching a banner with the phrase "The Union and the Constitution Forever" can first be seen in a campaign handkerchief from the Garfield-Arthur campaign in 1880 and again in the above campaign handkerchief from the 1892 Harrison-Whitelaw campaign. Note the size differential in the juxtaposition of candidates and eagle. In the nineteenth century images, the candidates faces hold prominence over the smaller eagles, but in the twenty-first century debates, the eagle dwarfs the candidates as if to promote democratic ideals over the identities and politics of the individuals who fleetingly hold office against the background of an eternal Constitution.

Image Credit: Anheuser-Busch

Like the somewhat ambiguous origins of the debate eagle, the Anheuser-Busch logo has somewhat mysterious origins, as their website explains that "no record remains of the symbol’s original designer or its exact meaning." Anheuser-Busch makes the reasonable speculation that the A in the logo stands for Anheuser and that the eagle may bear some connection to the prominent eagle imagery in US visual rhetoric.

Image Credit: United States Government

As noted in the Slate article, the debate eagle looks away from the olive branches of peace and toward the arrows of war, whereas the eagle in official government seals and even the nineteenth century campaign materials looks toward the olive branches. The Anheuser-Busch eagle only clutches arrows in its claws, but it looks away from the arrowheads (perhaps nodding to the wisdom in refraining from the use of weapons while imbibing while still never letting said weapons out of reach). Both the beer and debate eagles stand on a shield similar to that found in the Great Seal of the United States (though in the Anheuser-Busch logo the top of the shield points at the viewer while in the debate and nineteenth century images the bottom of the shield points at the viewer). And both pose with wings spread as if swooping down from the sky to grab prey or alighting to stand watch—be it over the principles of democracy or of free enterprise.

Seeking a Universal Language of Symbols: The Noun Project's Crowd-sourced Creation of Icons for Communication Across Languages

Todd Battistelli — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 19:16:19 +0000

Image Credit: UNOCHA

How can you quickly communicate concrete concepts to an audience that includes speakers of many languages and those who can't read? The Noun Project sees an answer in symbols, and it offers a platform for people to submit icon designs that others can download and use. On its "About" page, the Noun Project describes itself as:

a platform empowering the community to build a global visual language that everyone can understand. Visual communication is incredibly powerful. Symbols have the ability to transcend cultural and language barriers and deliver concise information effortlessly and instantaneously. For the first time, this image-based system of communication is being combined with technology to create a social language that unites the world.

But do symbols "have the ability to transcend cultural and language barriers" as they suggest? In looking at the symbols on the site, I wonder whether these icons rely just as much on enculturation for understanding as any written language does. The benefits of speed of comprehension and intelligibility across languages and cultures seem to depend on a similar learning process to that any literate person goes through if, perhaps, abbreviated.

For instance, what does the icon at the top of this post, with several people standing in a V formation with a speech bubble coming out of the front-most person, represent? Take a guess and scroll down to the bottom of the post for the answer. That icon and the others I discuss here are drawn from a set submitted by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. As The Noun Project says in its blog post introducing the set:

Symbols are some of the best communication tools we have to overcome many language and cultural barriers. When a disaster strikes, it is vital that the humanitarian community can gather reliable data on the locations and needs of affected people and who is best placed to assist them. This often involves the need to present complex information in a way that everyone can understand.

Image Credit: UNOCHA

There's an implicit tension in this blog post and in The Noun Project's overall mission that any effort to create universally understood symbols has to confront. The Project's "About" page talks of "transcend[ing] cultural and language barriers," but in describing the UNOCHA icons the Project discusses a narrower audience: "the humanitarian community." The humanitarian community is, of course, not a static and finite audience, as it continually changes as crises break out in different regions of the globe. However, there is more coherence within the "humanitarian community" as an audience than there is in an audience of any potential person who could come across a symbol, providing the opportunity for icons to be learned by that audience while people encountering the symbols for the first time would not have a similar opporunity.

Image Credit: UNOCHA

Even icons can't seem to get away from words entirely, as the symbol above designating a building associated with non-governmental organizations demonstrates. While English may be one of a few languages commonly used by many humanitarian organizations working with the UN, the promise of iconography is that it does not depend on knowing any one language to be understood. While professionals working within organizations may know English, it stands to reason that those working for local organizations with which the humanitarian groups are interacting may not. As seen in the screen shots below from the Wiktionary, the concept of an NGO is translated in a variety of ways, several not using the Latin alphabet.

Image Credit: Wiktionary screenshot

Image Credit: UNOCHA

Icons without letters do not necessarily communicate any more clearly to an undefined audience. Above we see a man, woman, and child holding hands standing in a house (at least a Western version of the house symbol: two walls with gable roof). The meaning of this symbol, according to the UNOCHA is "community building." I assume they mean a literal building (a structure) for community use (as opposed to the abstract concept of community building), because the Noun Project focuses on concrete concepts. Without the caption, I would think the icon represented something more along the lines of "family shelter" than "community building" because of the family image.

Image Credit: UNOCHA

The icon as a genre poses its own limitations. I'm not sure how I would represent "community," other than a dozen or more people of different ages, but a designer would be hard pressed to draw that many figures in a small building. These limitations, however, also result in some inventive use of visual design, especially in terms of conveying action. Above we see the icon for "forced recruitment," as one person pulls violently at another's arm who resists by leaning back and away from his assailant. The violence is conveyed through the use of a sharp-edged and angled bubble around the head of the person being conscripted, describing, it seems, the sharp movements associated with a struggle and/or the sudden shock of an assault.

Image Credit: UNOCHA

The nature of the violence in the "murder" and "assault" icons above is more difficult to interpret. The murder victim falls backward, their body presumably dead, but one could also be thrown backward by a non-fatal blow. Oddly, the icon for assault shows a persons standing straight up, not moving in any way, while the sharp-edged violence bubble stands at his/her side.

Given the need for audience participation in both learning to read the icons and creating icons that can be widely understood, the crowd-sourced nature of The Noun Project, such as seen in its iconathons and open submissions, seems vital to successfully designing symbols that are widely comprehended if not universal.

Concept for the first icon: "advocacy."

Mitt Romney vs. Big Bird: When Enthymemes Attack

Todd Battistelli — Mon, 08 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Source: Unknown

In last week's debate, one of the more memorable moments was Mitt Romney's vow to cut off government funding to public television despite his appreciation of both Big Bird and Jim Lehrer. Because he would neither raise taxes nor borrow money from China, Romney argued, he would cut programs like PBS. I suppose Romney intended the statement as a bit of red meat for his base—those who would rather their tax monies not go to PBS—and perhaps also for the putative independent/undecided voter who also distrusts such government spending. I also suppose that for such audiences the line worked. However, for other audiences, Romney's enthymeme provoked an outcry, because those audiences do not share the unstated premise in his argument that PBS does not merit continued funding. Sesame Street lovers (and Romney haters) across the web responded with a torrent of photoshopped images criticizing Romney's position.

Video Credit: PBS

Of all the PBS programming to attack (in addition to Lehrer's News Hour), Romney chose one of the most beloved children's television programs in the United States. Advocates have long grown used to defending public TV in the face of threats to cut government funding. In the video above, Fred Rogers defends PBS funding before a Senate committee considering cutting the budget for public broadcasting. The American Rhetoric website offers a transcript of his testimony, where Rogers wins the support of a Senator who was previously unfamiliar with Rogers' work.

Romney may not be familiar with the Rogers story, or he may not care. At any event, he felt confident enough to declare that Big Bird would feast no more from the giant bird feeder of government funds should he win the presidency. I suspect that if Big Bird could face down an Egyptian demon and assist a lost soul on his journey through the afterlife, Romney doesn't pose too great a challenge. And if Big Bird needs any help, he can find it in the wide-spread support being expressed on image boards and blogs.

Video Credit: Sesame Street

In the spirit of Sesame Street, I'm excluding images with graphic language or imagery, though they're out there if you want to search for them. The images cover a range of arguments, from supporting President Obama or criticizing Romney to supporting PBS, and they use a range of emotional tenors from good-hearted ribbing to sharp satire to anger and sadness.

Image Credit: John Aravosis

Much like Vice President Biden's summation of the first Obama term that bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive, the above image contrasts the different "aims" of the Obama and Romney campaigns, placing bin Laden and Big Bird behind bulls-eyes.

Image Credit: everyonedienow

Image Credit: leuqarraquel

Two Kanye West memes have been repurposed for this debate. In the first, his claim that George W. Bush doesn't care about black people has been replaced with Big Bird West saying that Romney doesn't care about Big Bird. In the second, Big Bird stands in the background as West pulls away the microphones from Willard Mitt "Taylor Swift" Romney, declaring "But Big Bird is one of the best birds of all time." (I have to admit that West's more proactive moderating style might have helped the debate stay on track better than Lehrer's tepid interjections.)

Image Source: LabCoder

Other images use Sesame Street common places. In one, Big Bird informs the viewer that today is brought to us by the letter U for unemployed. In another, using a frame from an episode, he sits sadly with two children on a Sesame Street stoop holding a sign reading "Will work for food."

Image Source: johnnyhuckleberry

Image Source: cinemascapes08

The real urban streets too provide source images with Occupy Wallstreet protesters replaced with muppets from the TV show. The #occupysesamestreet meme does predate Romney's Big Bird moment, but the images seem even more relevant now.

Image Source: Unknown

Familiar Obama campaign imagery serves as the basis for others, with Big Bird appearing in Shepard Fairey's famous "Hope" poster, standing next to the red, white and blue sunrise symbol, or picking up on the campaign's "We've Got Your Back" ad.

Image Credit: Unknown

Image Credit: davonemadisonjackson

Image Credit: perpetualfrizz

The Visual Rhetoric of Space: Optimism, Pessimism, and Realism in Astronomical Imagery

Todd Battistelli — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: NASA

With the recent passing of Neil Armstrong, the decommissioning of the space shuttles, and the release of the latest "deep field" image from the Hubble Space Telescope, the rhetoric of space imagery has been on my mind. Except for the occasional "why waste money on this?" argument, astronomical images find wide appreciation, appreciation which I certainly share. However, I also see a certain risk in the arguments made using space imagery that can be lost amidst the optimism and wonder.

The truism of an image speaking a thousand words falters before a photo like the one above where the immensity of space threatens to swallow all words. The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field is a compilation of observations of a small section of sky. As science writer Phil Plait says, even in such a small section, the telescope captures over 5000 galaxies, each with billions of stars.

The human mind cannot begin to understand such size and scope. Plait admits, "We humans, our planet, our Sun, our galaxy, are so small as to be impossible to describe on this sort of scale," yet he insists, "that's a good perspective to have." He goes on:

...we figured this out. Our curiosity led us to build bigger and better telescopes, to design computers and mathematics to analyze the images from those devices, and to better understand the Universe we live in.
And it all started with simply looking up. Always look up, every chance you get. There’s a whole Universe out there waiting to be explored.

Images somewhat closer to home more easily inspire human-scale arguments. Some see in the view of Earth from space an argument for human unity and concern for our environment, and these are common views from those who have made the trip into orbit. Such images first came to prominence during the Apollo missions, especially with "Earthrise" taken by William Anders during Apollo 8's mission to orbit the Moon.

Image Credit: NASA, William Anders

The image shows a small but vibrantly blue and white Earth set against the blackness of space and rising above the gray, rocky surface of the Moon's horizon in the foreground. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, remarked:

When you're finally up at the moon looking back on earth, all those differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend, and you're going to get a concept that maybe this really is one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people. (quoted in Denis Cosgrove's Geographical Imagination and the Authority of Images p. 22)

Image Credit: NASA

The "Blue Marble" and "Blue Marble 2012" offer closer perspectives of Earth's land, sea, and air unmarked by the political divisions of national borders.

Image Credit: NASA

Seeing these images, I find the unifying argument of an astronomical perspective enticing but also risky. If humans ever move out into space in any number, I think it likely that we'll take the full range of our social baggage with us, the values and ideas that inspire both justice and injustice. The risk lies in the tendency for factional interests to disguise themselves as universals. "The people of Earth" as a concept works well in the abstract, but it can obscure the contradictions that abound within that identification. Take, for example, the plaque left on the base of Apollo 11's lander.

Image Credit: NASA

The plaque bears the signatures of the three mission astronauts: Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrin. It also bears the signature of then-president Richard Nixon. (Sometimes I wonder if, in our distant future, some civilization, which has the ability to translate written English but lacks historical knowledge, might, in its exploration of the Moon, conclude that Nixon was among the first people to make the quarter million mile journey.)

The plaque speaks to American audiences and audiences the American government wished to address, though it gestures toward a global ethos by including images of the eastern and western hemispheres. The text reads, "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, A.D. We came in peace for all mankind." That stated intention of peace contrasts with the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War that drove the space program. During this peaceful mission, when Nixon spoke to astronauts on the moon from the Oval Office, he was also ordering the bombing of Cambodia and oversaw other campaigns in the Vietnam War – itself another event tied to the Cold War. I don't mean to suggest that the Apollo program was not peaceful in itself, but it existed within a complex set of relationships between war and peace and between the peoples of the Earth that an overly optimistic perspective can obscure.

Perhaps unity, then, may not be the best argument to construct from the visual products of our space explorations. Or, at least, not unqualified and decontextualized arguments for unity. A contextualized argument can be found somewhere between the unthinkably vast scope of the deep field image and the almost familiar views of Earth from orbit.

Image Credit: NASA

The Voyager 1 probe took this "Pale Blue Dot" image of our homeworld when it was some 3.5+ billion miles from Earth in 1990. Earth appears as a barely noticeable point (0.12 pixels according to Wikipedia) in the right-most bar of sunlight set against the void. Carl Sagan had asked NASA to take the photo. In his book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, Sagan offered an argument that speaks to a hopeful future while it also acknowledges tragedies past and present and the considerable challenges we face even with the suasive potential of astronomical images:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Of Ponies and Patriarchy

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 19:44:59 +0000

Image Credit: Center for Inquiry's Women in Secularism 2 Conference Website

Controversies over sexism have recently embroiled the online and in-real-life spaces of the gaming, fandom, and atheist communities. The sexist behavior that has sparked controversy and the backlash facing those speaking out against harassment are too hateful and ugly to discuss at any length here. I'll link to two examples with trigger warnings for threats of sexual violence: Rebecca Watson and Anita Sarkeesian. The controversy in the organized atheist community, however, has also seen an act of resistance and some levity in the face of abject misogyny by repurposing a visual trope well known to the community.

Since the early 2000s, the "new atheism" has attained prominence in the wake of outspoken and sometimes polemical writings. The most prominent of these writers are known as the Four Horsemen of New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens and Daniel Dennett.

Image Credit: Paul O'Flaherty

The Four Horsemen name alludes to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation, and it attempts to play off religious beliefs that the atheists criticize and evoke the emotional fervor that all sides invest in religious debate. Images like the one above cast the four authors in an arrangement that speaks to a serious, knowing demeanor, but it also evokes a somewhat forbidding feeling as well with their faces partially obscured in shadow. The fact that all four atheists are horsemen hints at the trouble with sexism in the organized atheist community. (The presence of all-white horsemen also speaks to atheism's trouble with racial diversity, but that's an issue for another time.)

Despite the role of women in the history of freethought, as documented by Annie Laurie Gaylor, and the presence of women writers and activists working today, women remain marginalized at various levels of organized atheism. Attendance at conferences often has a gender imbalance, and the leadership of some advocacy groups resist engaging with criticisms about sexism in the community.

The visual markers of patriarchy in the atheist community are not clear to those unaware of the operation of male privilege, though a critical appraisal raises red flags. For example, artist Saejin Oh published the drawing below of famous atheists who had influenced his thinking.

Image Credit: Saejin Oh

The atheists stand on a rocky rise against a threatening sky in confident poses befitting superheroes in a panel of a comic book. They are exclusively men. Those commenting on his work remarked on the absence of women, to which he replied, "I couldn't think of one that influenced me as a person of reason, unfortunately." At the time, Jen McCreight, a prominent blogger and advocate for feminism in the atheist community, remarked that she found his explanation "sad," suggesting that this was yet another example of gender imbalance in atheism.

Image Credit: Unknown Author

Other images ostensibly serving an epidiectic function of building atheist community demonstrate similar sex biases. Both the images above and below circulated in the popular atheism subreddit. Each carries the text message "Fear not hell, for if it exists, you will find yourself in good company" embedded over or around the faces of famous people who are also atheists. While these collages do contain some women, the imbalance is still noticeable, and these images are only a small part of much larger problems in the community.

Image Credit: joebbowers

The backlash facing those standing up against sexism has been brutal. Jen McCreight recently suspended her blog due to stress from online harassment. Pteryxx, commenting on a blog entry about sexism in atheism, jokingly suggested that "Perhaps we now have our Four Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse," referring to four prominent women bloggers. The commenter immediately after asked, "Is it terrible if I envision them riding out on My Little Ponies?" Soon, another commenter names embertine sketched out that vision.

Image Credit: embertine

More than four bloggers were eventually immortalized on ponies at Jason Thibeault's blog. In all the images, the bloggers bear weapons befitting an apocalyptic rider: whip, sword, daggers, mace and more. Oddly enough, in the first four images, the expressions of the riders contrast markedly with the expressions of the ponies. The riders' faces seem happy, while the ponies show grim determination and displeasure. These pictures hardly make up for the indignities the bloggers and other women in the community have faced, but they begin to push back on the sex imbalance in atheist visual rhetoric.

The Funny Faces of Politics: No Photoshop Required

Todd Battistelli — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Reuters

As we’re in the middle of another presidential campaign, I thought I’d devote my inaugural viz. post to an aspect of visual political rhetoric: photos capturing politicians with odd facial expression or in odd poses. One of the better known examples of this phenomenon is the above photo of John McCain from the last debate in the 2008 presidential campaign. In the still image, McCain stands behind Barack Obama, seeming to lurch after him while disrespectfully sticking out his tongue and reaching out with his hands. I want to stress “seeming,” though, because viewing McCain’s movement in context offers an alternative explanation.

Video Credit: C-SPAN

McCain’s seemingly undignified lurch occurred at the end of the debate, as he, Obama and moderator Bob Schieffer stood up from the table to shake hands. As seen in C-SPAN’s video (starting at 1:29:42), McCain is uncertain of which direction to round the table. In his hesitation, he makes a funny, self-deprecating gesture to make light of his momentary confusion. Not being the most graceful person myself, I can imagine doing something similar were I in McCain’s position. Yet the lurching image soon proliferated on the web, casting McCain as a creepy, out-of-touch old man.

Photojournalists do take a great number of pictures, so their capturing the occasional odd look isn’t unexpected. What I find curious, however, is the editorial decision that goes into releasing still photos of odd expressions when other, more decorous photos are available. As with many aspects of visual culture, there’s a tumblr that collects these funny faces titled Stupid Faces of Politics, which bills itself as “a non-partisan collection of amusing faces made by politicians, both past and present.”

Image Credit: Stupid Faces of Politics

Looking through the images, you could make the argument that photojournalists capture politicians as human beings, including all their foibles, though a still photo out of context can be used to vilify as much as humanize, as the McCain example suggests. The images could also serve the function of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted. The viewing public can enjoy a good chuckle at people in positions of power. Editorial policy, however, is tangential to my interests here.

More relevant to visual rhetorical analysis are questions about the use of these images and what those uses say about the production and reading of persuasive texts. My students sometimes run into trouble when they cite a source without understanding its context, but ignorance doesn’t seem to play a role in the operation (or manipulation) of context when it comes to these photos. The context of these photos is widely understood: weird expressions cross everyone’s face for fractions of a second, and sometimes they get recorded for posterity. Yet, they are not dismissed as “bad” photos. On the contrary, they serve as a important resource for rhetorical invention.

Image credit: Laura Clawson

When they appear on partisan blogs, these images are used not only for humor but also to support larger narratives about politicians and their parties. The above photo can be read as Mitt Romney desperately attempting to engage his empathy circuits, as blogger Laura Clawson suggests. Or below, President Obama seems to sport a patrician and elitist mug that looks down on common people, which is the narrative blogger Nice Deb invokes.

Image Credit: Nice Deb

In an age of photoshopping, what are the different suasive functions that these “authentic” images perform in contrast with, say, an image of Joe Biden manipulated to put a colorful lollipop in his hand and an exaggerated tongue extruding from his mouth? Do the ostensibly documentary origins of non-manipulated photos enhance their appeal?

Image Credit: Stogie

At a step removed from the bloggers who use these photos to construct arguments, I also wonder about which photos get released by which sources. Might they reveal some subtle argumentative strategy? Does the White House under Obama, for instance, release more odd photos of John Boehner than the Bush White House did of Harry Reid? This might not be the best example, though, as Boehner seems to be rather more susceptible to awkward photos than other politicians (saving perhaps Joe Biden, as photos like the one below attest).

Image credit: 500 Still Frames of Joe Biden Eating a Sandwich

I Turn My Camera On, Then My Photoshop

Rachel Schneider — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 05:51:58 +0000

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

H/T: Crushable

While I’ve done some recent fangirling over Ryan Gosling and Benjamin Franklin, I would have never imagined I could be in a photograph with them. At least, not until I saw Everett Hiller’s holiday party photographs, into which he Photoshopped various celebrities.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

According to Hiller, “Every year my wife and I throw a party and when I send out the photos I add famous people.” The results are extremely entertaining and include some amazing guests: everyone from The Rock and Tom Cruise to George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Hiller’s photographs represent an unusual extension of the kind of fan culture in which Gosling, Whitney Houston, and I Made America participate. While the joke lies in the juxtaposition of major Hollywood celebrities with the homely setting, these recontextualizations act like fan fiction. For example, if Shia LaBeouf is known for his alcohol-fueled antics, placing a bleary-eyed picture of him next to a smirking man builds new stories from established canon. Having an impeccably besuited Neal Patrick Harris amidst drunken revelers winks at his How I Met Your Mother character Barney Stinson, who always takes perfect photographs. Positioning Ryan Gosling among everyday partygoers expands on established Gosling meme fanon, in which Gosling is happy to talk feminism and typography with you.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

However, these kinds of images also build or serve to make arguments about the nature of the celebrities included. For example, many Republicans accused Obama in 2008 of being a “celebrity” who was out-of-touch with Americans because he was “worr[ied] about the price of arugula”—and they’re still making that argument today. The above image, which integrates Obama in the middle of a middle-class (and otherwise white) party, visually argues that Obama is a Regular Joe who exists on the same level as his fellow citizens. The surprise of the guy in the green hat behind him even naturalizes him into the setting insofar as it would probably be a huge shock for most of us to meet Obama in some guy’s living room.

Image Credit: Everett Hiller

Outside of a political context, however, picturing Tom Cruise cackling while posed on a piñata reinforces the narrative of Cruise as a crazed Scientologist, a narrative that has been used to criticize Scientology’s practices. These photographs work based on an idea of celebrity that is simultaneously near and far: celebrities are both just like us and stand out in the crowd. Hiller’s Photoshopping makes the famous blend in naturally and unnoticeably with their surroundings but also invites viewers to play a game of Where’s Waldo, looking to see how many late-night comedians stand in the background. As Joseph Roach defines celebrity as the possession of “it” or “the arresting, charismatic power of celebrities,” these photographs arrest the celebrities within a visual frame and encourage the viewers to sympathetically merge themselves with them.

Image Credit: Newsweek

This seems like a pretty benign use of Photoshopping technology; however, the placement (and displacement, in the case of Hillary Clinton) of celebrities in new contexts can have the power to shock and disgust. The above image created by Newsweek to grace their magazine cover drew outrage from those who thought Tina Brown was tasteless to put a dead Princess Diana next to the daughter-in-law she will never know. The accompany story, which imagines how Diana might have been at 50, is a kind of fanfiction, but the picture’s power meant that more people focused on it. What we can see from this is that while anybody with the money can create any sort of fictionalized image, Photoshop’s rhetoric is governed by decorum. Using the technology to make funny pictures is fine, but it’s not allowed to pervert truth—probably because it’s so easy to do just that. If perception is reality, Photoshop is a powerful actor in the war of words—and a valuable tool for retooling actors.

What would Proust do with Google Maps?

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:00:00 +0000

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

In David Sasake's blog post, "How to read Google Earth like Proust," he notes that Marcel Proust liked to read train timetables before bed. According to Alain de Botton, "[T]he mere names of provincial train stations provided Proust's imagination with enough material to elaborate entire worlds, to picture domestic dramas in rural villages, shenanigans in local government, and life out in the fields." Place names can float up in our subconsciousness, rekindling memories long forgotten like rabbits pulled out of a magician's hat. So what would Proust make of Google Maps, and especially Google's massive, ongoing "Street View" function, where an ever-expanding swath of the globe is mapped, photographed, and instantly accessible? What happens when you can view almost anyplace, anytime?

Screenshot from Google Maps

I'm asking because I spent the afternoon visiting places from my past, not in reality, but through Google Maps. That house above, appropriately blurry, is the house I lived in as a small child. Though hazy, as with memory, I can visit it anytime online; though I'm now some eight hundred miles and twenty years away from it. I can retake my morning walk to serve 6 am mass at the Catholic church, if I want. Or, as below, I can recreate the drives into the country that I--and every other underage smoker with a car--took on summer days a decade ago.

Screenshot from Google Maps

Or I can, if I want, stand at the very street corner where I said goodbye for the last time to my first college girlfriend (on a day when the shadows of the trees stretched out across the street in just the same way as below). But Google Street view is fickle: though I can wave goodbye forever, I can't (yet) stand at the streetcorner where I first met my wife.

Screenshot from Google Maps

And though I can stare down the street above forever--where, while being mugged at gunpoint, once upon a time I thought that empty billboard might be the last thing I would ever see--I can't at the moment recreate the view from my Catholic school's parking lot, or see the park my teenage friends and I would sneak out to after curfew.

The street view function of Google Maps seems tailor made for such Proustian reveries. Like memories, it's full of gaps. Places that you ought to be able to find aren't there. Places you never thought you'd see again are suddenly at your fingertips. What fascinates me is the power to recreate: to walk down streets you'd long forgotten and to recognize the incongruous, some detail that brings the past flooding back to you. Like so much on the internet today, there are whole communities dedicated to this kind of recovery of the past, though my favorite is Ogle Earth. I found it through Sasaki's aforementioned blog, and it's well worth checking out. Using Google Maps, Stefan Geens has mapped out one of the Hippie Trail routes through Afghanistan--a virtual recreation of a (now seemingly-impossible) past. Similarly, the website What Was There overlays historical information--particularly photography-- onto current Google Maps, allowing the user to "see" the past.

Screenshot from Google Maps via Jon Rafman

Though not yet a part of history, Jon Rafman's sometimes haunting (see the photograph at the top of this piece), sometimes comic, sometimes somewhere-between-the-two (see the photograph above) cullings from Google Street View seem a fitting place to end this post. Rafman's work, the best of which is featured here along with an excellent essay here, collapses the distinctions between the utilitarian and social value of Google's project and the "street photography" movement that flourished in Cartier-Bresson's wake. Rafman's images seem pulled from a collective (Proustian?) unconscious that also happens to be the obhjective world around us. He winnows out of the omnidirectional impassive cameras attached to Google's vehicles images that provoke social consciousness, laughter, even an occasional mystical awe at the world around us. Strangely enough, the seemingly quixotic, because practical, goal of Google Maps--the ability to plan routes in any part of the globe--has become a repository for half-a-decade's worth of what Cartier-Bresson would refer to as "decisive moments."

Flickr Visual Rhetoric Assignment by Eileen McGinnis

Lisa Gulesserian — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 18:16:40 +0000

Image Credit: topgold

For a handout, download the PDF document outlining this assignment.

Overview:

At the start of the semester, my students in “The Rhetoric of Science Writing” read an excerpt from Pale Blue Dot, Carl Sagan’s prose meditation on a grainy image of Earth taken from the Voyager One mission. Without the accompanying text, the photograph is pretty unimpressive. However, after reading Sagan’s words, it would be difficult for readers to question the value of that image, since at stake is nothing less than our definition of what it means to be a human occupant of Earth, an argument for our responsibilities toward each other and toward the planet.

For their final short assignment, students themselves try on the role of “science writer”: they are asked to find a scientific image, contemporary or historical, and write a brief (500-600 word) argument that attempts to persuade a non-scientific audience of their image’s value. Their goal is to convince readers that their chosen image warrants a closer look and to leave them with a more informed appreciation of its contents.

Rather than submitting the assignment and accompanying image to the instructor, they will post both the image and text to the photo-sharing site Flickr. Using Flickr to collect students’ work will then enable them to present and discuss their images on the following class day. In addition, the relative “publicness” of this assignment will hopefully foster a sense of community and shared purpose (students can use content-specific tags to make their visual arguments more easily searchable by a broader audience).

Of course, this exercise doesn’t necessarily have to come attached to formal assessment.

The broader idea here is to use Flickr to create a class “image gallery,” which will facilitate discussion about both individual images and trends across a group of images. Flickr would also work for a more informal homework assignment or even an in-class activity on visual rhetoric, in which students retrieve and analyze visual artifacts for class discussion.

Pedagogical Goals:

To practice considering audience, establishing ethos, and finding voice.
To appreciate the ways in which visual and textual information can combine to create a powerful argument.

Description:

Rather than walking through the details of my particular assignment, I’ll provide a couple of logistical tips that are more broadly applicable to using Flickr in class:

On the day before the assignment is due, one would likely spend a class period on visual rhetorical analysis. So, using Flickr to post one’s own images for that class discussion might help to model how Flickr can be used in a rhetoric classroom. It would also make sense to leave time for students to set up Flickr accounts on the class computers.
Make sure that students “tag” photos with the unique number for the course, so that you can easily search for the images later. You might also link your course site to the unique-number search results on Flickr, so that there is a record of the group project.
Note that Flickr allows students to annotate photos directly, which might be helpful for students’ presentations of their images.

Modifications:

The “Groups” feature on Flickr might offer another way to organize your students’ posts versus having them tag the photos. If you were concerned about access, it would also allow you to control who gets to view the images and/or comment on them.

Credit:

Thanks to John Jones for helping me figure out the logistics.

Calendar Boys, Beefcake Girls: Photographing the Bodies We Want

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image Credit: Rion Sabean

H/T: Melanie Haupt

My favorite way to take a break from dissertation research is to visit Facebook. Some days, I’m lucky enough to be entertained by my friends, as when Melanie Haupt posted a provocative link to an article about male pin-ups.

As linked by websites like The Huffington Post, The Daily Dish, and Jezebel, photographer Rion Sabean has captured a series of men in pin-up poses similar to those captured by photographers like Alberto Vargas and models like Bettie Page. The pin-up, as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary, is “a photograph or poster of a glamorous or attractive person.” However, pin-ups historically have been women, and women engaged in poses like the one below.

Image Credit: Fine Books and Collections

Sabean’s intent appears to have been to play with the gender roles here by making men adopt these kinds of poses, as he said in an interview with Jezebel:

"The imagery of showcasing the feminine/masculine ideals in one single image just struck me as something that could really work. Hilariously enough, and beyond my fascination with gender binaries and their inherent nature to be completely incomprehensible to me, I first began tinkering with the idea, because I will at any given moment strike very specific poses that would be defined as feminine by society; more specifically, the pointed toe. Haha. From there, it was completely obvious that pin-ups and all the associations with them would be the right choice in moving forward."

Comparing the images above already reveals similarities; both guy and gal have pursed lips and are posed in ways which are probably uncomfortable to hold but which highlight aspects of the physical form like the shapely leg and curvy body. The sporty paraphernalia in each scene only contrasts the deliberately inactive pointing fingers and splayed hands. Another group of images, this time in nearly the same pose, points out what Melanie acknowledged: these poses are very ridiculous and not a little degrading.

Image Credit: Acidcow.com / Rion Sabean

In these pictures again we see the juxtaposition of the masculine objects (the shovel, the military hat) and the highly feminized pose. The placement of the hands not only allows the subject to stay nearly vertical but also draws attention to the model’s assets. The reveal of undergarments (the underwear, the stockings) tantalizes the viewer. While these images serve to comically point out the problematics of the pin-up pose, I find myself as a viewer wondering if these can be read in a different way—can these men be sexy, too? Or can we find poses for women that wouldn’t be degrading?

To keep thinking about the sexualized posed body, I’d like to think about two other image collections I’ve seen this last week: the Men of the Stacks calendar and ESPN The Magazine’s just-released Body Issue.

Image Credit: The Men of the Stacks

In the case of the Men of the Stacks calendar, these gentlemen have collected together to rebrand the idea of the librarian:

"We know what people think: Dewey, glasses, shushing, books, hairbuns, Party Girl and card catalogs. Yes, we know what people think. We know that the American library profession is approximately 80% White and 72% female; and we know that tens of thousands of librarians are expected to reach age 65 in the next 5 years. We also know that this is not us.
"There is an entire population of professional librarians out there who disagree with the way the library profession is perceived in contemporary media outlets and in the historical consciousness of the American mind. Different people and different associations will use different means to try to change those perceptions. This is ours."

While not all of the photographs are as revealing as Mr. January’s, several of them use shirtless (or shirtless in aprons) men to spice up visuals of a profession whose sexualization in pornography stands in stark contrast to how it is perceived in popular culture. While the various poses—doing yoga, on a beach, cooking—attempt to make the idea of the male librarian as a lived experience palpable to the viewer, the fact that several pictures feature shirtless men makes it very similar to a straight beefcake calendar like the yearly NYFD Calendar of Heroes, which features actual New York firemen posed provocatively with hoses and other paraphernalia, or even the beefcake magazines of the 40s-60s. In other words, if the female form has frequently been sexualized by artful poses, the male has experienced the same treatment, though one with more arm-flexing.

Image Credit: ESPN The Magazine

However, if both The Men of the Stacks at Sabean’s Man-Ups are engaging in social commentary, ESPN the Magazine’s Body Issue appears to be a marketing ploy. While Ryan Kesler here is posed next to a block of ice to nod to his sport, this pose does more to show off his physique than his athletic skills. On the other side, Julie Chu's pose harkens less to the pinup and more to Greek statuary.

Image Credit: ESPN The Magazine

While this pose hints at her feminine features, it's also fairly aggressive—the eye wanders as much to her muscular arms as the breasts her pose conceals. The tensed shoulder and stomach also make it clear that what is (at least nominally) on display here is her strength. Julie Chu isn’t a pin-up, she's a warrior. However, it’s also legitimate to ask if we can see a naked female form without sexualizing it. The tagline, "Bodies We Want," can be read ambiguously either as the desire to have a muscular physique, or to have a partner so built.

As I’m thinking about these different poses together, I'm left questioning what kinds of viewers are being imagined here. ESPN the Magazine clearly offers some titillating interest for a straight male readership, but the photographs of individuals like Apolo Ohno and José Reyes are either intended for a gay male readership, or a straight female one. The audience for the Man-Ups is one that knows and has reflected on the original pin-ups that have inspired the poses; it’s an audience who gets the joke and can return the wink. However, can man-ups be as sexy as these other poses? If we understand the female body to be always sexualized, is there room for a female gaze to re-read these poses?

Of course, I don’t want to argue that women’s sexuality looks any different from men’s sexuality. I remember here the xkcd cartoon that responded to the Porn for Women book, where the female character asserts: “I wanted to clarify: in my porn, people fuck.” Women or men can be titillated by all sorts of different things, and we can’t essentialize that. Sexy is definitely in the eye—or the brain—of the beholder. Perhaps I just want to invite further discussion considering how we think or choose to think about the gendered body in photography. Theory has much to say about the power of the subject viewing the object/body—but how are the powers of the viewer limited by hegemonies? And how can we talk about bodies while allowing and acknowledging all various forms of sexuality that might approach them?

Visualizing Censorship II

Jake Ptacek — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:00:00 +0000

Image: Partial Screen shot from Google Maps

How do you make a topic like censorship visible? After all, the goal of censorship is to make things, in a literal sense, invisible, un-seeable. But in a world where (sometimes wonderfully, sometimes insidiously) the visual has come to be paramount, how can you visualize censorship, see what can’t be seen? A few weeks ago, I posted about a few of the visual images highlighted by the Harry Ransom Center’s new Banned, Burned, Seized, and Censored exhibit related to this topic. Inspired by Banned Books Week—it’s this week, in case you didn’t know—I want to examine some modern representations of censorship.

First up is a project originated by Chris Peterson of the National Coalition Against Censorship and Alita Edelman of the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, “Mapping Censorship”. As viz.’s own Lisa Gulessarian noted last week, Google Maps has been instrumental in helping us reorganize our relationships to the real world, and the “Mapping Censorship” project—now maintained by the American Library Association (ALA)—makes visible what can seem all-too-theoretical.

The project is simple: the ALA marks the location and records the details of book ban or challenge in the US from 2007 on. A flag on a map indicates a challenge, sometimes of multiple texts. I should note that the map is incomplete: the ALA records all challenges reported, but estimates that those challenges are possibly less than a quarter of all incidents nationwide, as the majority of challenges are never reported. Nonetheless, there’s an astonishing amount of information available, as each flag will provide you with a summary of the challenge and, in some cases, take you to further resources: blog entries, letters from concerned parties, and so on. Even without that additional content, the map makes an elegant ideological point—we’re a country awash in censorship.

Image: Screenshot from Flicker

While “Mapping Censorship” makes censorship visible geographically, this banner—constructed by the staff of the Dayton Metro Library in Dayton, OH—constructs its appeals ideologically. And while it’s nothing new to lay claim to the American flag in quest of public support, I can’t help but find this image impressive. The books are 99 of the 100 most-challenged books from 1990-2000 (the missing book is Daniel Cohen’s Curses, Hexes, and Spells from 1974, a fondly remembered childhood classic). There’s a certain power in being able to see the texts in question (you can find a larger version of the image here). While some of the choices are unsurprising—The Anarchist Cookbook, Madonna’s Sex—others seem idiosyncratic, at best: Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik series? Where’s Waldo?? Plus, the Banned Books Week Banner makes for a fine game of Banned Book one-upsmanship, as you can challenge your friends to find out who has read more books from the list (I come in at a solid fifty-one, if you’re interested).

The point being made by these images is that censorship can easily be dismissed, as its nature is to be invisible, to be registered, if at all, only as a gap in experience. Visual rhetoric is a powerful tool in reclaiming and making visible that practice. Those who wish to ban books understand the power of visual images and language to articulate alternative viewpoints. Those who oppose censorship need images like these to keep that struggle out in the open. While all this sounds somewhat unavoidably leftist (and, full disclosure, I am), I don't want to make it out that censorship is the result of some kind of massive government conspiracy. It's not (usually). The vast majority of books are challenged by parents (good parents, even): parents who read to their children, who encourage a love of books, parents who value how important reading is as a cultural and personal act. That's why it's all the more important that we discuss--critically and out in the open--what kinds of viewpoints we can tolerate and represent. In that debate, we discover who we are (as a person, public, and nation). These images make a good start.

YouTube & Fair Use (Part II)

snelson — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:29:37 +0000

Image Credit: Scott Nelson, Creative Commons, Attribute, Share-Alike

Last week, I addressed only the first stages in a YouTube copyright dispute. Should a copyright holder wish to issue a Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notice, the process is a bit more involved. This past year, the company introduced the YouTube Copyright School, a kind of “traffic school” for copyright violations. If a user receives a copyright violation notice, she is forced to watch a five-minute cartoon about copyright and complete ten questions regarding the content. As I mentioned above, on the third such copyright notice, the user is banned from uploading to YouTube for life. YouTube commissioned the creators of The Happy Tree Friends to craft the video tutorial, and so far, the video has received over half a million views, with around 1600 likes and five times as many dislikes. While the video certainly informs users of their rights and responsibilities under copyright, it uses visual rhetoric to present copyright law as frightening and complicated. Such a characterization contributes to the chilling effect on using copyrighted content to create YouTube videos.

The choice of the Happy Tree Friends is an interesting one. The cute woodland animals are not without controversy, as they have been attacked by parents’ groups for their depictions of violence. What’s more interesting for the purposes of this post, though, is that the Happy Tree Friends themselves couldn’t exist without Fair Use protections, yet they star in a cartoon that gives short shrift to users’ fair use rights. Compare the characters Lumpy and Splendid with another famous moose and flying squirrel.

Image Credit: Steve Eighinger & the Happy Tree Friends Wiki

The similarities are intentional, and I’m sure the creators of Happy Tree Friends would claim parody protections under Fair Use. Their cartoons, after all, are a cross between Rocky & Bullwinkle and The Itchy & Scratchy Show from The Simpsons. In their normal cartoons, the Happy Tree Friends dismember each other and fall victim to many industrial accidents. They’ve cleaned up their act a bit for the YouTube Copyright School, though.

The YouTube Copyright School video centers around Russell, a pirate sea otter who can’t seem to avoid violating copyright law. He captures video in a theater with his smartphone, films a live performance, and even attempts a mashup using his own puppetry set to copyrighted music. Only when he creates his own song for his final video does he avoid the narrator’s ire, and when he creates original content, he has “the right to post [the video] to YouTube."

The video addresses three situations where Russell has violated copyright, and gives only one scenario where he would avoid getting strikes against him: “by singing an original song” and “creating [his] own content”

While this is one scenario when copyright law would not be violated, the video fails to account for other forms content creation that would fall under Fair Use, and specifically places mashups in the “violates copyright” category, though that debate is far from over.

YouTube does address Fair Use in the context of mashups, but the visual and aural rhetoric is designed to mystify users and dissuade them from using copyrighted material. From cute scenarios acted out by the characters, we get a quick 23-second treatment of Fair Use, and this treatment is far from fair.

Fair Use literally forces its way onto the screen and crushes the main character. The narrator then reads through some legalese explaining fair use at a speed normally reserved for the end of commercials, where the fine print exculpates a company for any injuries sustained from the product. The speed at which it’s read coupled with its violent entry and intimidating wall of text paint Fair Use in a scary light, something reserved for lawyers and judges and not the laypeople of YouTube. This visual message is clear: Fair Use is dangerous and unintelligible, so you shouldn’t concern yourself with it anyway.

YouTube’s Copyright School chooses to make the rights of copyright holders seem simple, while portraying the rights of users, mashup artists, remixers, and home video enthusiasts as abstract and complex. In its defense, YouTube began offering a Creative Commons licensing option for uploaded videos, so it is stepping in the right direction to allow users to share their creations (though, at the time of this posting, there is no option to disallow commercial use of uploaded creative commons videos). YouTube’s reasoning behind their rhetoric is somewhat understandable, as Google is a company attempting to protect themselves against further litigation from copyright holders like Viacom and Fox. However, YouTube is a site that built itself on user-generated content, and as such, it owes its users a fair representation of current copyright law. YouTube’s Copyright School presents a skewed version of copyright, one which tips the balance in favor of owners over culture and public domain. Such portrayals can have a chilling effect on participatory media, where Fair Use is exercised less and less because people are frightened by possible ramifications.

Sol Lewitt, #StankyLegg, and the Publics for Conceptual Art

noelradley — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:47:43 +0000

Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt Via UIC

Can the Stanky Legg bring new publics to conceptual art? Perhaps this is arguable. But why don't you make up your own mind about it while Chaz Evans shakes a leg in his Vimeo video. Shots of Evans dancing the Dougie, the Robot, and the Hustle after the break.

The shots of dancing are from the interactive exhibit EDBSL-Evans Dances Baldessari Sings Lewitt, and the dancer and creator is a MFA at University of Illinois Chicago, who is working with the 1972 recorded performance of artist, John Baldessari.

As Evans writes on his Vimeo page: "I feel that this is a tribute to [Baldessari] in that I think his vocal stylings have been hidden too long in the walls of art institutions and video art websites. Perhaps by my dancing them to popular moves it will bring his songs to a much larger public." Baldessari's songs range from the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy to arhymthic compositions with no tune at all in the style of 1970s performance art.

With his get-down-boogie dancing, Evans is mirroring the intention of Baldessari himself who was in 1972 trying to reach out to the public by translating another strange artifact. Baldessari's singing was a delivery of the premises of conceptual art written by Sol Lewitt.

Conceptual artists are mystics rather than rationalists. They leap to conclusions that logic cannot reach.
Rational judgements repeat rational judgements.
Irrational judgements lead to new experience.
Formal art is essentially rational.
Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically.
If the artist changes his mind midway through the execution of the piece he compromises the result and repeats past results.
The artist's will is secondary to the process he initiates from idea to completion. His willfulness may only be ego.

The sentences(there are 35 of them in all) don't seem to be written for a popular audience. But that didn't stop Baldessari and now Evans from bringing them to those who wouldn't engage or understand. Evans not only translates each sentence into a dance move from American popular culture. His exhibit also allows the viewer to use a controller to scroll through and choose which dances/sentences to experience. Evans writes, "It may be the case that after selecting the dances you will experience additional enjoyment brought on through a principle of choice-supportive bias."

It seems to me the exhibit does interesting work. It assumes the value of connecting new people with the historical work of conceptual artists. But this connection is made with a good dose of humor, more familiar parts of American culture, and also through gesture and the body. The disarming, enlivening dancing by Evans mediates a problematic relationship between the American public and the cultural heritages they either ignore or cannot access.

The user-oriented interface of the exhibit is another layer on top of that.

Sol DeWitt, Circle With Towers Via Artnet

Landmarks, our public art program on UT-Austin campus, recently helped to buy a major work of art by Sol LeWitt, "Circle with Towers." But the comments on the Landmarks press release indicate that conceptual art and the public still, at times, remain at an impasse. Those who posted comments against "Circle with Towers" argue that in a tight economy, the money used to purchase art would be better used on salaries, university technology, or anything else. The anti-art comments also question the aesthetic value and meaning of the Landmarks collection, which are mostly contemporary works of abstraction. On the other hand, the comments from art professionals and staff indicate the assumption that contemporary art has enduring value for the public. The whole purpose of the Landmarks program is to give people access (the art pieces are installed across UT campus). In their replies, the Landmarks staff post web links to multi-media support materials such as podcasts, written context, and images.

I believe the mini-controversy at UT shows that there is a bit of work to do in regards to engagement, but I believe personally that this presents a vital opportunity for us to reimagine our relationship to art in America in the new economy. I think Evans with his Stanky Legg is on to something. We need to engage art with our bodies. Also, I think we need to consider that we're not going to survive in a time of scarcity without digging into creative ways of thinking. It isn't going to work anymore to continue the status quo, and who better to show us that than artists like Lewitt who lived to upset it.

Reboot: Bodies of Evidence by Emily Bloom

noelradley — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 13:22:34 +0000

Image Credit: The Museum of Fat Love

H/T: Layne Craig

Amidst massive media coverage of the “obesity epidemic,” visual arguments have emerged online that challenge the terms of the current debate. One example is the website, The Museum of Fat Love, which presents a collection of photographs of smiling couples. Similarly, Newsweek ran a series of photographs on their website titled“Happy, Heavy and Healthy” in which readers submitted pictures of themselves performing athletic feats. Both websites called for volunteers to submit evidence that individuals classified as overweight or obese can live healthy, happy lives. The use of visuals in both instances is striking—both websites are predicated on the understanding that overweight individuals have been misunderstood (perhaps even vilified) in the course of public debates on obesity and public health.

These photo collections led me to consider representations of obesity in other media and, particularly, the cropped photographs that feature so regularly on local nightly new programs. Why is it that obesity is so often represented by a headless body? Although the obvious answer is to protect the identity of these individuals, such images paint an eerily dehumanized portrait of obesity. The obesity debate has created a strange visual rhetoric that photographic montages such as The Museum of Fat and “Happy, Heavy and Healthy” may be attempting to reorient.

Image Credit: MSNBC

In a recent article in Slate Magazine, "Glutton Intolerance," Daniel Engber argues that social stigmas against overweight individuals are not only deplorable but may actually cause the health problems associated with obesity. Citing a study by epidemiologist Peter Muennig, Engber writes that weight discrimination contributes to the stress-related illnesses that are generally attributed to obesity. If weight-stigma is itself a public health “epidemic” then perhaps visual evidence for active, well-loved plus-size people may perform an important function in undermining stigmas and, thereby, relieving dangerous stress.

Bloom's Original Post from October 6, 2009.

Disaster Pedagogy

Megan Eatman — Thu, 17 Mar 2011 14:38:25 +0000

Red Teardrop, via Anota bien.

My class, Rhetoric of Tragedy, is based on the idea that the events we normally label “tragic” are always points of contestation. The right way to remember, what we should do to ensure that it never happens again, who to blame—all of these are controversial questions that provide an opportunity to study how we argue. But it can be hard to talk about these conversations in class, especially when you are looking at visual rhetoric. How do we address these contemporary events without making the classroom an upsetting place?

It seems strange to ignore the earthquake and tsunami in a class that is built around discussion of devastating events. We talk about upsetting topics in class, although I do tell students that what they consider "tragic" is open to debate; I have received (very good) papers on, for example, Lindsay Lohan's personal decline and Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction. However, I think there is a utility to discussing scary or sad events as they happen, too. Making students aware of these moments as rhetorical as they happen seems like a key way to increase day-to-day critical literacy. What is important, I think, is making it clear that seeing the rhetoric in these public images doesn’t take away from the victims’ pain. In this case, it is actually easy to keep their pain in perspective because a potential motive (and a definite effect) of most of these images is to show how heart wrenching this event is. It gives us an opportunity to talk about how photographers show someone else’s pain: through direct images of anguish, of course, but also through the fear and fascination of seeing a building sway or an enormous crack in the ground. We can ask, why are there so many amateur videos of the destruction available online? Why do people want to see this? What work does it do? It can encourage students to think about when images help and when they sensationalize without helping. This particular event also gives us the opportunity to talk about the rhetorical power of animals, since the news coverage features images and stories of animals in peril.

Via Buzzfeed

My concern, of course, is that photographs will be upsetting for one or more students. While we're all adults, and we've certainly looked at some upsetting material before (meth PSAs come to mind), I do want the classroom to be intellectually challenging but still comfortable; students shouldn't feel as if their feelings or personal losses are being disrespected. While that is a concern for practically all of the events we talk about (especially Hurricane Katrina, because of the geographic proximity and huge affected population), there is normally at least a little distance between the class and what happened.

"Support the Tsunami and Quake Relief," Dave CT

We will talk about this event, but in a particular way. I would like students to discuss what they have been seeing, if only briefly: what images appear, and what effects do they have? Why do you think this picture was taken, published, circulated, etc--what is its rhetorical power? Additionally, I'd like to spend some time talking about the art that has come out of the event, like the first and third images in this post. Students have the option to make a poster for their final projects, so I think it is useful for them to see what one might look like. Some, like the Red Teardrop, seem very effective; others, like the image above, are somewhat more confusing for certain audiences, but potentially still persuasive. Talking about these images is relevant to the students' own work and allows us to engage with the images and the event in a way that is less likely to rub salt on a very raw, very recent wound.

BagNewsNotes Salon: Photos from Egypt

noelradley — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:51:31 +0000

Flyer by BagNewsNotes

We wanted to share news about an international webinar hosted by BagNewsNotes forthcoming Sunday March 20th at 12 noon CST. You can register ahead of time for this important online discussion of images from the Egyptian revolution. For more about BagNewNotes, read our first viz. post from the spring semester. See also our previous discussion about how the New York Times represented the early days of the protests in Egypt.

Cairo and Perspective

noelradley — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 18:44:49 +0000

Lefteris Pitarakis Via New York Times

Since protests began one week ago across Egypt, the media has published many photographs of iconoclasm against images of President Mubarak, or images depicting the scale of the protests in Cairo. I'd like to raise the question of how representative images from this week are using one-point and two-point perspective, and how that perspective informs our sense of the unfolding events.

Screenshot from Saturday's New York Times

The three images in this post were included in Saturday's New York Times print edition. All three shots were taken Friday, January 28th in Cairo. In the second image (above) taken from a distance in Tahrir Square, the battle between protestors and riot police is framed within ominous symbolic and literal signs of Mubarak's government. The height of the statues and the architecture of the bridge creates the scale, making the crowds of human actors seem vast, and yet simultaneously diminutive? Two-point perspective furthers the unsettling paradox of an emergent populace protesting within an existing power structure. Our eyes move in two directions: to the left, along with police and protestors, and then also to the right, into the smoky haze and background of imposing government buildings.

Screenshot from Saturday's New York Times

The third image (above) uses one-point perpective to capture a row of protestors kneeling for prayer in the streets. The orientation of the shot insinuates the immense number of protestors, while communicating the depth of spiritual quiet. What we see in the closest part of the frame appears to be replicated ad infinitum, with all the optical persuasion of a hall of mirrors. This image works in much the same way as the lead image by Pitarakis (top), which captures civilians standing on the row of army tanks (also in one-point perspective). The image of the tanks is different from the scene in prayer, however. One difference is the vanishing end point: in one, the eye moves toward halos of city lights at night; in the other, the eye finds dark, billowing smoke. Do these images attempt to organize and find order in the protests? Why did the NYT choose so many compositions of this kind? Are these compositions tied to a need to see Egypt through Western eyes?

Meat is Couture? - Lady Gaga's Meaty Message

Cate Blouke — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 06:38:12 +0000

Image Credit: Lady Gaga at the VMAs, Designer Franc Fernandez

I realize that I may be a bit behind the times to be addressing (ha!) Lady Gaga's fashion stunt of last fall, but meat's been on my mind this week as I'm about to embark on 30 days of eating vegetarian - largely as a result of the text we're teaching in our introductory rhetoric classes here at UT: Colin Beavan's No Impact Man. But that's another story. Gaga's appearance at the Mtv Video Music Awards sparked controversy that dissipated rather quickly, and though this may have been due to the singer's own inability to adequately (or logically) explain the reasons behind her wardrobe choice, the images left behind offer a really interesting opportunity for varying and disparate interpretations.

While I was surprised (and a bit disappointed) to discover that Jezebel didn't have much to say about the dress, my immediate reaction was to think of the outfit as a commentary on female objectification. The dress literalizes an all too familiar trope - that women are just pieces of meat - and the contrast between the female body and the hunks of beef strewn about it seemingly negates the metaphor by calling attention to it. Yet considering Gaga's videos and her ethos in general, it could also easily be argued that the outfit does just the opposite (reenforcing the trope/idea/attitude instead of negating it), especially considering the precursor to the dress - her appearance on the cover of the Japanese Men's Vogue in a meat bikini. They say we are what we eat, perhaps we are what we wear, too?

Image Credit: Vogue Hommes Japan

Now, while Gaga argued that she meant no disrespect to vegetarians, that didn't prevent a backlash from animal right's activists and environmental groups. PETA was predictably outraged by her VMA outfit, though their response was surprisingly brief. Ecouterre.com, a website devoted to sustainable fashion, instead used the dress as a conversation point, exploring the environmental impact of designer Franc Fernandez's 50 lb. creation. I'm sure both organizations would disagree with me, and perhaps this is a bit of a stretch, but I can see how one might argue that the dress is in fact an argument for vegetarianism and animal rights.

Image Credit: Designer Franc Fernandez

For one thing, looking closely at the dress certainly doesn't make me want to run out and eat a steak. But it also opens up space for an argument through analogy - how is wearing leather any different from wearing pieces of beef? Vegetarians are often critical of those who abstain from meat but still wear animal products, and the dress seems to call attention to this complaint. It also calls into question what constitutes acceptable use - if we can eat it, why can't/shouldn't/don't we wear it? And vice versa? Would the fur trade somehow be more palatable if we ate all the animals we wore?

Gaga's dress wasn't the most appetizing wardrobe choice, but it certainly got some attention. Everyone should be please to note, however, that the dress won't be going to waist - according to People Magazine, the dress is slowly turning into beef jerky that will be preserved for posterity (not eaten).

(Apologies for the rampant puns in this post, but I simply couldn't resist).